Laissez faire is first and foremost a beautiful notion: leave the world alone. It manages itself.

In many ways this idea is the very seat of human civilization.

The term is pronounced lay-say-FAIR and derives its present-day meaning from Vincent de Gournay’s half-forgotten codification:

Laissez-faire et laissez-passer, le monde va de lui même.

“Let it be and let goods pass: the world goes by itself.”

People who believe in total, unadulterated laissez faire, as I do, believe that society contains within itself the capacity for ordering and managing its own path of development, without need or necessity of government directing it.

This includes ordering and managing ecosystems of every type and stripe which are clearly best managed by a system of full and fully recognized private property rights, not centralized planning committees or elite bureaus who determine everything for everyone else.

It follows from this that people should enjoy the liberty to manage their own lives, associate as they please, act and interact with anyone and everyone who voluntarily and consensually agrees to act and interact with them, including the freedom to exchange with anyone who voluntarily and consensually agrees to an exchange with them, which in turn includes — and please listen closely — owning and accumulating property and otherwise being unencumbered even when one grows wealthy as a result of the freedom to voluntarily exchange.

Accumulating wealth is a right, not a privilege. All humans are free to grow as wealthy as they’re able, provided it’s exclusively the result of free and voluntary exchange, without any fraud, extortion, protectionism, or any other form of force or deception involved.

Money is merely a medium of exchange — nothing more and nothing less. It’s a medium of exchange that represents the value of your work or the value of something you own, whether you’ve made the thing or discovered it or exchanged for it.

For all the lip-service they pay anarchism, the egalitarians, the communitarians, the agrarians, and all other similarly minded groups simply will not tolerate hierarchy, neither in employment structure nor in wealth accumulation — willfully turning a blind eye to the obvious fact that human beings are diverse and varied and therefore possess varying degrees of motivation, ambition, persistent: the greatest factors in determining how wealthy a person becomes.

It’s for this reason that inequality measures — i.e. egalitarianism — in any form require the initiation of state force.

Laissez faire promotes diversity in full.

Laissez faire asks only this: that people be left alone, free to pursues the lives they want for themselves, free to act and interact with anyone who voluntarily, consensually agrees to act and interact with them, free to keep what others have freely exchanged with them.

Laissez faire is the politico-economic expression of each and every individual’s right to her own life. It states that your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

There are in the present day two main alternatives to laissez faire, neither of which is more convincing than the other:

There’s the so-called Left, which, to speak generally, believes that if we let the economic sphere be free, the world will collapse. The Left then hypothesizes all manner of disaster that will befall humankind without government intrusion in the form of taxation, the environment, energy, housing, healthcare, education, interstate commerce and much, much more.

There’s also the so-called Right, which is a corollary of the Left, not an opposite, the other side of the same slab. The Right  postulates all manner of disaster which will befall humankind without government intrusion into, for instance, your sex life, your bedroom, your choice to gamble, your choice to use drugs, your choice to drink alcohol at whatever age, your choice to reject tradition,  the world will collapse into debauchery and crime and war.

Laissez faire rejects both views — for reasons some have described as self-evident, yet clearly not so to everyone, if at all.

“The harmony of interests,” as the French economist Claude Frédéric Bastiat called it, which make up the social order, and which stands in diametric opposition to all doctrines of conflict, Marxian, Neo-Marxian, or otherwise, posited as the natural state of humankind.

Laissez faire is the view that artists and creators, merchants and entrepreneurs, philanthropists and farmers, academics and laborers, renters and property-owners, intellectual and blue-collar workers — all humans, in sum, should be left alone.

It’s the view that everyone, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, possesses the  right to her own life and property — and only her own life and property — and that this condition of existing (i.e. by right) is the only way for all human-beings to live freely.