A Humane Economy

John D. Mueller of the Mises Institute suggests that Smith himself inadvertently opened the door to threats to humaneness by neglect of consumer welfare and his naïve confidence (according to Mueller) that the personal self-interest of producers and exchange between free individual producers would provide protections for the human persons in their roles as labor and consumer. Mueller argues that this neglect gave free reign to ignoring, first, consumption, what consumer goods would create the greatest general welfare and, second, distribution, how consumer goods should be provided proportionately for the general welfare of all people. The void left by the lack of a theory of consumption and the lack of a theory of distribution was filled by makeshift approaches that Wilhelm Ropke called “anarchistic laissez-faire”, the naïve belief that the chaos and clutter of market exchange will in and of itself ensure healthy enterprises and a humane society and not lead to greed and injustice. In fact, in a world dominated by the industrial complex, anarchistic laissez-faire can be argued to have left the human being as both worker and consumer in a state where there is little to choose from in the face of giant corporate-institution industrial complexes.