Never has laissez-faire thought been as dominant as it was among French economists, beginning with J.B. Say in the early nineteenth century, down through Say’s more advanced followers Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer and to the early years of the twentieth century. For nearly a century, the laissez-faire economists controlled the professional economic society, the Societe d’Economie Politique and its journal, the Journal des Economistes, as well as numerous other journals and university posts.

There are two ways of considering society.1 According to some, the development of human associations is not subject to providential, unchangeable laws.

In order to define and delimit the function of government, it is first necessary to investigate the essence and object of society itself. What natural impulse do men obey when they combine into society? They are obeying the impulse, or, to speak more exactly, the instinct of sociability. The human race is essentially sociable. Like beavers and the higher animal species in general, men have an instinctive inclination to live in society.

Why did this instinct come into being?

If there is one well-established truth in political economy, it is this:

That in all cases, for all commodities that serve to provide for the tangible or intangible needs of the consumer, it is in the consumer’s best interest that labor and trade remain free, because the freedom of labor and of trade have as their necessary and permanent result the maximum reduction of price.

And this:

That the interests of the consumer of any commodity whatsoever should always prevail over the interests of the producer.

We are consequently led to ask ourselves whether his exception is well founded, in the eyes of the economist.

It thus has been demonstrated a priori, to those of us who have faith in the principles of economic science, that the exception indicated above is not justified, and that the production of security, like anything else, should be subject to the law of free competition.

Once we have acquired this conviction, what remains for us to do? It remains for us to investigate how it has come about that the production of security has not been subjected to the law of free competition, but rather has been subjected to different principles.

What are those principles?

Let us now examine how it is that all known governments have either been subjected to the law of monopoly, or else organized according to the communistic principle.

First let us investigate what is understood by the words monopoly and communism.