Economic liberalism

Economic liberalism is a political-economic outlook favoring private property, voluntary exchange, and market coordination, with limits on state control of economic life.

Private property: A system of rights governing control, use, and transfer of resources. Secure ownership lets individuals and firms decide how to use resources and exchange them.
Classical liberalism: A political tradition emphasizing individual liberty, constitutional government, and limited state power. Economic liberalism grew alongside classical liberal arguments for individual rights and constraints on rulers.
Mercantilism: An early modern economic doctrine favoring state-directed trade and policies to increase national power. It represents the regulatory and national-power-oriented order liberal critics opposed.
Comparative advantage: The principle that trade can benefit parties specializing in goods they produce at lower opportunity cost. It supplies a major argument for reducing barriers to international exchange.
Market economy: An economic system in which prices and exchange coordinate much production and allocation. Economic liberalism treats markets as a primary means of coordinating economic decisions.
Physiocracy: An eighteenth-century French school that treated agriculture as the source of national wealth and favored natural economic order. Physiocrats challenged mercantilist controls and helped establish arguments for freer economic activity.
Socialism: A family of political and economic doctrines favoring social or public control over important productive resources. Socialist traditions challenge economic liberalism's reliance on private ownership and market allocation.
Consumer sovereignty: The idea that consumers' choices guide production through their purchases in market economies. It connects market allocation to individual choice, while leaving open how unequal incomes shape that choice.
Price mechanism: The way changing prices transmit information about scarcity and influence economic choices. Prices help coordinate dispersed decisions without a central authority directing each exchange.
Adam Smith: An eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and political economist who analyzed commercial society and markets. Smith's account of specialization and exchange became a lasting foundation for economic liberal thought.

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