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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nihil who wrote (35835)	4/25/1999 10:16:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 108807

You are quite right to call me on that, nihil. Mea culpa. What I should have said is that the concept of "laissez faire" was first developed and popularized, as a general principle (beyond its physiocratic application), by "liberal" thinkers. To avoid putting my foot in my mouth again, I will simply quote the following little blurb from encyclopedia.com: laissez faire [Fr., (= (leave alone], in economics and politics, a doctrine holding that an economic system functions best when there is no interference by government. It is based on the belief that the natural economic order tends, when undisturbed by artificial stimulus or regulation, to secure the maximum well-being for the individual and therefore for the community. The principles of laissez faire were formulated by the French PHYSIOCRATS in the 18th cent. in opposition to MERCANTILISM. In Britain, Adam SMITH, Jeremy BENTHAM, and J.S. MILL developed laissez faire into a tenet of classical economics and a philosophy of individualism. During the 19th cent. the so-called MANCHESTER SCHOOL of economics popularized the doctrine of free trade and brought laissez faire into politics(e.g., by securing repeal of the CORN LAWS). In time,laissez faire came to be perceived as promoting monopoly rather than competition and as contributing to boom-and-bust economic cycles, and by the mid-20th cent. the principle of state noninterference in economic affairs had generally been discarded. Nevertheless, laissez faire, with its emphasis shifted from the value of competition to that of profit and individual initiative, remains a bulwark of conservative political thought, influential in the 1980s in such government administrations as that of Ronald REAGAN in the U.S. and Margaret THATCHER in Britain. encyclopedia.com