[6] Although never practiced with full consistency, laissez-faire capitalism emerged in the mid-18th century and was further popularized by Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations.
[10] Argenson himself had used the phrase earlier (1736) in his own diaries in a famous outburst: Laissez faire, telle devrait être la devise de toute puissance publique, depuis que le monde est civilisé [...].
[12]Vincent de Gournay, a French Physiocrat and intendant of commerce in the 1750s, popularized the term laissez-faire as he allegedly adopted it from François Quesnay's writings on China.
[19] The Physiocrats proclaimed laissez-faire in 18th-century France, placing it at the very core of their economic principles and famous economists, beginning with Adam Smith, developed the idea.
Since, in their view, this natural order functioned successfully without the aid of government, they advised the state to restrict itself to upholding the rights of private property and individual liberty, to removing all artificial barriers to trade, and to abolishing all useless laws.
George Whatley's 1774 Principles of Trade (co-authored with Benjamin Franklin) re-told the Colbert-LeGendre anecdote; this may mark the first appearance of the phrase in an English-language publication.
James Mill's reference to the laissez-faire maxim (together with the "Pas trop gouverner" motto) in an 1824 entry for the Encyclopædia Britannica that really brought the term into wider English usage.
For more than a decade, the experiment appeared successful, but 1768 saw a poor harvest, and the cost of bread rose so high that there was widespread starvation while merchants exported grain to obtain the best profit.
[20] Many of the ideas of the physiocrats spread throughout Europe and were adopted to a greater or lesser extent in Sweden, Tuscany, Spain and in the newly created United States.
However, The Economist campaigned against the Corn Laws that protected landlords in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland against competition from less expensive foreign imports of cereal products.
The intention of Croce and of Sartori to attack the right to private property and to free enterprise separating them from the general philosophy of liberalism, that is primarily a theory of natural rights, was always criticised openly by the quoted philosophers and by some of the main representatives of liberalism, such as Luigi Einaudi, Friedrich Hayek,[42][43][44] and Milton Friedman.
"[49] Frank Bourgin's study of the Constitutional Convention and subsequent decades argues that direct government involvement in the economy was intended by the Founding Fathers.
The goal was to ensure that dearly-won political independence was not lost by being economically and financially dependent on the powers and princes of Europe.
Others view Bourgin's study, written in the 1940s and not published until 1989, as an over-interpretation of the evidence, intended originally to defend the New Deal and later to counter Ronald Reagan's economic policies.
Notable examples of government intervention in the period prior to the American Civil War include the establishment of the Patent Office in 1802; the establishment of the Office of Standard Weights and Measures in 1830; the creation of the Survey of the Coast (later renamed the United States Coast Survey and then the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey) in 1807 and other measures to improve river and harbor navigation; the various Army expeditions to the west, beginning with Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery in 1804 and continuing into the 1870s, almost always under the direction of an officer from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers and which provided crucial information for the overland pioneers that followed; the assignment of Army Engineer officers to assist or direct the surveying and construction of the early railroads and canals; and the establishment of the First Bank of the United States and Second Bank of the United States as well as various protectionist measures (e.g. the tariff of 1828).
This school of thought was inspired by the ideas of Hamilton, who proposed the creation of a government-sponsored bank and increased tariffs to favor Northern industrial interests.
[55] In 1986, Pietro S. Nivola wrote: "By and large, the comparative strength of the dollar against major foreign currencies has reflected high U.S. interest rates driven by huge federal budget deficits.
Advocates of laissez-faire capitalism argue that it relies on a constitutionally limited government that unconditionally bans the initiation of force and coercion, including fraud.
[76][77] This tradition has been recently associated with contemporary scholars such as Kevin Carson,[78][79] Roderick T. Long,[80][81] Charles W. Johnson,[82] Brad Spangler,[83] Sheldon Richman,[84][85][86] Chris Matthew Sciabarra[87] and Gary Chartier,[88] who stress the value of radically free markets, termed freed markets to distinguish them from the common conception which these left-libertarians believe to be riddled with capitalist and statist privileges.
[89] Referred to as left-wing market anarchists[90] or market-oriented left-libertarians,[86] proponents of this approach strongly affirm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets while maintaining that taken to their logical conclusions these ideas support anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical and pro-labor positions in economics; anti-imperialism in foreign policy; and thoroughly radical views regarding such cultural issues as gender, sexuality and race.
[93][94] Kevin Carson describes his politics as on "the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism"[95] and has also been highly critical of intellectual property.
[96] Carson has identified the work of Benjamin Tucker, Thomas Hodgskin, Ralph Borsodi, Paul Goodman, Lewis Mumford, Elinor Ostrom, Peter Kropotkin and Ivan Illich as sources of inspiration for his approach to politics and economics.
[97] In addition to individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker's big four monopolies (land, money, tariffs and patents), he argues that the state has also transferred wealth to the wealthy by subsidizing organizational centralization in the form of transportation and communication subsidies.
[98] The theoretical sections of Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy are also presented as an attempt to integrate marginalist critiques into the labor theory of value.
[102] Carson coined the pejorative term vulgar libertarianism, a phrase that describes the use of a free market rhetoric in defense of corporate capitalism and economic inequality.
[103] Gary Chartier offers an understanding of property rights as contingent yet tightly constrained social strategies, reflective of the importance of multiple, overlapping rationales for separate ownership and of natural law principles of practical reasonableness, defending robust yet non-absolute protections for these rights in a manner similar to that employed by David Hume.
[106] He advances detailed arguments for workplace democracy rooted in such natural law principles as subsidiarity,[107] defending it as morally desirable and as a likely outcome of the elimination of injustice rather than as something to be mandated by the state.
Further, "In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain ... continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
[120] Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation criticizes self-regulating markets as aberrational, unnatural phenomena which tend towards social disruption.
[123] The main issues of raw capitalism are said to lie in its disregard for quality, durability, sustainability, respect for the environment and human beings as well as a lack of morality.