MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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WHAT IS LAISSEZ FAIRE - You'd think that the meaning of laissez faire should be well understood, but apparently it isn't. A nice young woman named Tena sent me a textbook definition that she liked. It has a passel of problems. Before we look at a false definition, here's the correct one. It's a French phrase that means "Let us alone!" A minister of state once asked what France could do to encourage and support commerce, and a frustrated manufacturer replied, "Laissez-nous faire!" In the tradition of liberal government it connotes a separation of business and state, just like separation of church and state. Economic freedom means freedom from taxation, regulation, subsidies, labor camps, public works, etc. It implies the freedom to take a job, or quit; to spend money, or save for a rainy day; and the right to own property as an individual person. I'm not asking you to agree that any of this is a good idea. But let's agree that "laissez faire" means economic freedom. Fair enough?Laissez faire capitalism is NOT a system in which the state safeguards property in private hands. Laissez faire as such has nothing to do with armed forces or cops.
Laissez faire does NOT facilitate the formation of trusts, by which an individual or committee gains and perpetuates a hegemony in an economic sector. The only way to facilitate the formation of immortal "legal persons" (corporations and trusts) is for government to grant a charter of some kind.
Laissez faire does NOT facilitate unrestrained banking, by which an individual or committee exercises control over money and ownership shares it has been empowered to manage as it sees fit. Instead, laissez faire promotes and rewards competition.
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Event # 202: YEAR OF THE DRAGON
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Absent government regulation, firms which produce competing products DO NOT merge or acquire each other, in a cooperative or hostile manner, directly aggregating market share and producing prima facie monopolies. Most of the corporate merger activity we are witnessing is an outcome of predatory taxation.
Laissez faire has NOTHING to do with central banking. Marx and Engels enumerated it as one of the ten points of the Communist Manifesto ("centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with statecapital and an exclusive monopoly").
Laissez faire is NOT similar to communism, which was destructive of cooperation, competition, invention, and privacy. The whole concept of freedom is to be free of your neighbors ³ meeting only in the marketplace to trade. In laissez faire, there are no bureaucrats, no commissars, no warlords, no state religion.
The economic result of laissez faire is THE OPPOSITE to that of socialism: those who are most productive are rewarded, and the greater an individual's ability, the greater the likelihood that he will be trusted and respected by others in the marketplace.
In laissez faire, you CANNOT be influenced unconsciously by psychomanipulative advertising, because there is no law requiring you to watch a Soviet newscast or to participate in workplace political debates. Laissez faire has no elections and no candidates for public office.
I know this isn't the answer you wanted, Tena. But let's leave the meaning of laissez faire where it belongs. It ain't socialism or fascism or mercantilism. There is no evil lurking in free markets or a free people.
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