Gustave de Molinari

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Gustave de Molinari

Gustave de Molinari (March 3, 1819 - January 28, 1912) was a Belgian-born economist associated with French laissez-faire liberal economists such as Frédéric Bastiat and Hippolyte Castille.

Throughout his life, together with the other Économistes, Molinari defended peace, free trade, freedom of speech, freedom of association (including voluntary trade unions), and liberty in all its forms, and opposed slavery, colonialism, mercantilism, protectionism, imperialism, nationalism, corporatism, economic interventionism, government control of arts and education, and, in general, all of what he considered to be restraints on liberty. Living in Paris, in the 1840s, he took part in the "Ligue pour la Liberté des Échanges" (Free Trade League), animated by Frederic Bastiat. On his death bed in 1850, Bastiat described Molinari as the continuator of his works.

In 1849, shortly after the revolutions of the previous year, Molinari published two works: an essay, The Production of Security, and a book, Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare, describing how a free market in justice and protection could advantageously replace the state. In Les Soirées he says:

"The monopoly of government is no better than any other. One does not govern well and, especially not cheaply, when one has no competition to fear, when the ruled are deprived of the right of freely choosing their rulers. Grant a grocer the exclusive right to supply a neighborhood, prevent the inhabitants of this neighborhood from buying any goods from other grocers in the vicinity, or even from supplying their own groceries, and you will see what detestable rubbish the privileged grocer will end up selling and at what prices! You will see how he will grow rich at the expense of the unfortunate consumers, what royal pomp he will display for the greater glory of the neighborhood. Well! What is true for the lowliest services is no less true for the loftiest. The monopoly of government is worth no more than that of a grocer's shop. The production of security inevitably becomes costly and bad when it is organized as a monopoly. It is in the monopoly of security that lies the principal cause of wars which have laid waste to humanity."

In the preface to the 1977 English translation Murray Rothbard called The Production of Security the "first presentation anywhere in human history of what is now called anarcho-capitalism" though admitting that "Molinari did not use the terminology, and probably would have balked at the name." Anarcho-capitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe says that "the 1849 article The Production of Security is probably the single most important contribution to the modern theory of anarcho-capitalism."^[1]

In the 1850s, Molinari fled to Belgium to escape threats from France's Emperor Napoleon III. He returned to Paris in the 1860s to work on the influential newspaper, Le Journal des Debats, which he edited from 1871 to 1876. Molinari went on to edit the Journal des Économistes, the publication of the French Political Economy Society, from 1881 until 1909. In his 1899 book, The Society of the Future, he proposed a federated system of collective security, and reiterated his support for private competing defense agencies.