Knowra Laissez-faire Laissez-faire Laissez-faire is a doctrine favoring minimal government intervention in economic activity, relying on voluntary exchange and private decision-making to coordinate production and trade.
Price mechanism : The process by which changing prices communicate scarcity and coordinate decisions by buyers and sellers. Prices are the main signals through which laissez-faire markets coordinate production and exchange.
Physiocracy : An eighteenth-century French school of political economy that treated agriculture as the source of national wealth and favored natural economic order. Physiocrats helped establish the idea that economic life should follow a natural order rather than detailed state controls.
Keynesian economics : An economic approach holding that changes in aggregate demand can cause prolonged fluctuations and that public policy can stabilize output and employment. Keynesian policy supports intervention when private spending fails to sustain economic activity.
Industrial Revolution : A period of major technological and economic transformation beginning in Britain in the eighteenth century and spreading worldwide. Industrialization expanded market production and sharpened debates over state involvement in working conditions.
Supply and demand : The relationship between buyers' willingness to purchase and sellers' willingness to provide a good at different prices. Their interaction explains how markets set prices without central direction.
Adam Smith : A Scottish moral philosopher and political economist whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations analyzed markets, specialization, and economic growth. Smith's account of markets became a lasting foundation for arguments favoring limited economic direction.
Command economy : An economic system in which public authorities make major decisions about production, investment, and resource allocation. It places economic coordination under central direction rather than relying chiefly on markets.
Factory Acts : A series of nineteenth-century British laws regulating working hours and conditions, especially for women and children. They show how industrial harms prompted limits on laissez-faire in labor relations.
Private property : A system of rights allowing people or organizations to possess, use, transfer, and exclude others from assets. Laissez-faire depends on private control of productive resources and the ability to exchange them.
The Wealth of Nations : Adam Smith's 1776 book examining the causes of national wealth, division of labor, and commercial society. Its analysis is often treated as a foundational statement of market coordination, though not an absolute rejection of government.
Show all 24