Jean-baptiste colbert laissez-faire

Laissez-faire, the French phrase meaning "let [it/them] do", has become synonymous with the concept of minimal government intervention in free markets. Its proponents argue for a near-complete separation of government from the economic sector, allowing transactions between private groups of people to occur free from any form of economic interventionism such as subsidies or transfer payments.

This economic system is founded on the principles that the individual is the basic unit in society, with a natural right to freedom, and that the physical order of nature is a self-regulating system.

Its early advocates believed that markets should naturally be competitive, and therefore, self-regulating. To maximize freedom and allow markets to self-regulate, these early advocates proposed a tax on land rent (similar to Georgism) to replace all taxes that they saw as damaging welfare by penalizing production.

While associated with capitalism in common usage, there are also n