Courses
Courses for Kids
Free study material
Offline Centres
More
Store Icon
Store
SearchIcon
banner

What is Laissez-faire?

Answer
VerifiedVerified
551.7k+ views
Hint:
> Economic policies held by capitalist countries are an example of laissez-faire.
> The word Laissez-faire was originally a French economic term which means "allow to do, ". > It is usually pronounced "LAY-zay fair".
> The term laissez-faire possibly originated in a meeting between the French Finance Controller-General Jean-Baptiste Colbert and a group of French businessmen in 1681.

Complete answer:
Laissez-faire is an 18th-century economic philosophy rejecting any government interference in corporate affairs. The guiding philosophy behind laissez-faire, a French term that translates as "leave alone" (literally, "let you do"), is that the less the government engages in the economy, the better off the business and society as a whole by extension. A central aspect of free-market capitalism is laissez-faire economics. First and foremost, economic competition represents a natural order" that dominates the world, the basic principles that make up the fundamentals of laissez-faire economics. Since this natural self-regulation is the best form of regulation, laissez-faire economists claim that government interference does not require business and industrial relations to be complicated. As a result, they reject any kind of government intervention in the economy, including any kind of regulation or oversight. They are against duties, minimum wages, corporate taxes, and trade restrictions. Popularized in the mid-1700s, one of the first formulated economic philosophies is the theory of laissez-faire. It began with a community known as the Physiocrats, which thrived from around 1756 to 1778 in France. For the study of wealth, they attempted to apply scientific concepts and methods. They argued that the health of a free society needed to have a free market and free economic competition.

Note
> Political conservatives in the United States adopted a powerful anti-regulation, free-market platform after runaway inflation in the 1970s.
> The presence of total sovereignty in a state-of-the-art economy produces a situation of chaos for both producers and consumers, according to Thomas Hobbes.
> Laissez-faire works well for economic development because it creates the greatest opportunity to generate prosperity for individuals.