The Challenges of Laissez-Faire Democracy

Economists are frequently accused of being advocates for unfettered and unregulated laissez-faire markets, but anyone who has ever taken a basic introductory economics class knows that this caricature is untrue. The basic intro econ class does spend time on explaining what markets do well. It also spends considerable time on the category of “market failures” where markets often do not do so well, including externalities like pollution, investment in public goods, poverty and inequality, provision of information, encouraging competition rather than monopoly, and other categories. But as Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman point out in “Against laissez-faire democracy” (Economics & Philosophy 2026, pp. 1–17), many of these conceptual problems arise, albeit in different forms, in democratic elections as well. Thus, arguments in favor of rules and regulations to govern the operation of economic markets are also aguments for rules and regulations to govern elections. For example, they…

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