The Volokh Conspiracy Was coldhearted laissez-faire ideology responsible for American slavery and the suffering of the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century?

Economic nationalists insist that tariffs were central to the economy’s takeoff in the late 19th century. The evidence ...

Another good example of laissez-faire economic policy is 1994's North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which lifted tariffs on a majority of goods produced and traded by the U.S., Canada ...

Where the words “new history” appear, revisionism will follow. Shlaes’s introduction tells us, “It is time to revisit the late 1920s and the 1930s.

Jacob Soll has written “Free Market: The History of an Idea” not to praise the free market but to bury it. The laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were, for Mr. Soll ...

By contrast, and against the general assumptions of laissez-faire ideology, Victorian Britain was a country of growing state intervention. Next Previous Published: 2004-11-04 ...

By the middle of the 19th century, laissez-faire was firmly established as the guiding principle in economic life. ... Eric Evans is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Lancaster University.