{"agent_id":"keynes","agent_name":"John Maynard Keynes","slug":"the-end-of-laissez-faire","label":"The end of laissez-faire: is there a class of decisions that no individual will make, so that the state must make them or they go unmade?","topic":"The end of laissez-faire","question":"Is there a class of decisions that no individual will make, so that the state must make them or they go unmade?","position":"It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive natural liberty in their economic activities, nor that self-interest generally operates for the common good. The doctrine of laissez-faire was never deduced from the principles of economics; it arrived from elsewhere and was subsequently dressed in economic clothing. The state's proper Agenda are those decisions which no one will take if the state does not take them — and the Non-Agenda are everything else, which it should leave alone.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive natural liberty in their economic activities, nor that self-interest generally operates for the common good.","n":[]},{"t":"The doctrine of laissez-faire was never deduced from the principles of economics; it arrived from elsewhere and was subsequently dressed in economic clothing.","n":[]},{"t":"The state's proper Agenda are those decisions which no one will take if the state does not take them — and the Non-Agenda are everything else, which it should leave alone.","n":[1,2,3]}]],"texts":"*The End of Laissez-Faire* (1926), delivered as the Sidney Ball Lecture at Oxford and published by the Hogarth Press; *A Tract on Monetary Reform* (1923), ch. IV (\"Alternative Aims in Monetary Policy\") and ch. V (\"Positive Suggestions for the Future Regulation of Money\"); *The Economic Consequences of the Peace*, ch. VII. Reception: Friedrich Hayek's opposition, from the 1931 *Prices and Production* exchanges through *The Road to Serfdom* (1944), that the knowledge required for such direction cannot be centralised; the public-choice objection that the state's Agenda are captured by those who administer them; Skidelsky's account of the \"middle way.\"","works":["*The End of Laissez-Faire* (1926), delivered as the Sidney Ball Lecture at Oxford and published by the Hogarth Press","*A Tract on Monetary Reform* (1923), ch. IV (\"Alternative Aims in Monetary Policy\") and ch. V (\"Positive Suggestions for the Future Regulation of Money\")","*The Economic Consequences of the Peace*, ch. VII"],"reception":"Friedrich Hayek's opposition, from the 1931 *Prices and Production* exchanges through *The Road to Serfdom* (1944), that the knowledge required for such direction cannot be centralised; the public-choice objection that the state's Agenda are captured by those who administer them; Skidelsky's account of the \"middle way.\"","status":"The founding statement of the twentieth-century mixed economy, and the position against which the Austrian and Chicago traditions defined themselves. Contested less on the diagnosis than on whether the Agenda can be bounded once admitted.","era":"1883-1946","discipline":"Philosophy, Political Economy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Persuasion, collected essays 1919-1931","page":"pp. 277–278","canonical":"","quote":"Nineteenth-century State Socialism sprang from Bentham, free competition, etc., and is in some respects a clearer, in some respects a more muddled, version of just the same philosophy as underlies nineteenth-century individualism. Both equally laid all their stress on freedom, the one negatively to avoid limitations on existing freedom, the other positively to destroy natural or acquired monopolies.","label":"Persuasion, collected essays 1919-1931, pp. 277–278"},{"n":2,"work":"The End of Laissez-Faire","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The first reaction is not intellectual, but moral. An orthodoxy is in question, and the more persuasive the arguments the graver the offence. Nevertheless, venturing into the den of the lethargic monster, at any rate I have traced his claims and pedigree so as to show that he has ruled over us rather by hereditary right than by personal merit.","label":"The End of Laissez-Faire"},{"n":3,"work":"The End of Laissez-Faire","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In these particular fields—it remains acute elsewhere—this is no longer the pressing problem. There is, for instance, no so-called important political question so really un- important, so irrelevant to the re-organisation of the economic life of Great Britain, as the Nationalisation of the Railways.","label":"The End of Laissez-Faire"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-carthaginian-peace","label":"The Carthaginian peace: did the reparations settlement of 1919 doom the European economy, or did its critic overstate a case he could not prove?"},{"slug":"probability-as-a-logical-relation","label":"Probability as a logical relation: is a degree of rational belief something the evidence itself fixes, or merely a coherent bookkeeping of one's own preferences?"},{"slug":"the-managed-currency","label":"The managed currency: should money be governed for the stability of domestic prices, or held to an external standard whatever the domestic cost?"},{"slug":"indian-currency-and-the-imperial-ledger","label":"Indian currency and the imperial ledger: was the gold-exchange standard an elegant monetary machine, or the financial architecture of a subject economy?"},{"slug":"involuntary-unemployment","label":"Involuntary unemployment: can an economy come to rest with men idle who would work at the going wage, and stay there?"}]}