Marching with Molinari towards Liberty

Wednesday 15 February 2012

January 28, 2012 was the centennial anniversary of the death of the Belgian/French free market economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912). In an active career which spanned over 50 years he fought doggedly against protectionism, statism, militarism, colonialism, and socialism. In one of his last books published in 1899 he quotes from an essay he wrote at the height of the 1848 Revolution in which he appeals to the socialist movement of the day to abandon their use of violence to impose an unworkable system of socialism on the economy, and to join with him and the other liberals in pursuing what he calls “the utopia of liberty” which could be achieved with the opposite means - namely peaceful trade and cooperation. </quotes/359>

Molinari appeals to socialists to join him in marching down “the broad, well-trodden highway of liberty” (1848):

We (both) seek … Justice and Plenty! …Your way lies along the obscure and hitherto unexplored defile of the organisation of labour, ours down the broad, well-trodden highway of liberty.