Avoiding intervention in the economic processes by any government body.
The basic philosophy was developed or taught by Jean Baptiste Say, James and John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Charles de Tocqueville. Society is a group of individuals, highly competitive, possessed of equal rights, who through searching for and acting out of their own economic interests will naturally bring about the general welfare. Generally under criticism throughout the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, it ceased to be a policy of any modern state by the end of World War I.
It is the responsibility of government to care for the general welfare of the public, especially in the economic arena.
Laissez faire economics leads to the economic oppression of the masses, especially by those in control of large amounts of wealth.