Debates about
Laissez-Faire

From the nation’s founding, the pursuit of individual opportunity has held a central place among American values. The Declaration of Independence extolled the “pursuit of happiness,” which has increasingly been interpreted as the chance to accumulate material wealth. The Bill of Rights, adopted after the Constitution was ratified, protected personal liberties from interference by the federal government. Early Supreme Court decisions upheld the binding nature of contracts. The immigrants who came to the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries assumed that they would have the opportunity to achieve whatever success their talents and hard work would bring.

In the late nineteenth century, as big business consolidated and giant trusts came to dominate whole industries, defenders of unfettered big business argued that individual effort and initiative were still the central engine of the American economy. Championing Adam Smith’s notion of laissez-faire—the idea that the marketplace should be left to regulate itself—they argued that government should do nothing to constrain the development of industry. Yet as poverty expanded while a small number of industrialists and financiers accumulated great wealth, reformers questioned whether individualism undermined community, and contended that the government should regulate the free market to promote the greater public welfare. With the gap between rich and poor growing, even industrialists realized that if they did not help the poor in some way, the working classes would rise up against them. Nevertheless, they continued to resist government interference.

Defenders of the status quo argued that individualism must be preserved as the natural order of society. Critics countered that cooperation rather than individual competition made social progress possible and that the government should protect ordinary people from the harm done by greedy capitalists. As you read the following documents, which provide contrasting views of the meaning of success, consider these questions: How does each author define success? How do these authors intend to promote success? And what can be done to relieve the plight of those who do not succeed?