>Historically, societies with laissez-faire economic policies have been associated with rigid, hierarchical social structures with negligible social mobility.

>Historically, societies with laissez-faire economic policies have been associated with rigid, hierarchical social structures with negligible social mobility. Historically, ALL societies have possessed rigid, hierarchical social structures with negligible social mobility, and very few of them had anything close to laissez-faire economic policies. What made Renaissance / Enlightenment Europe a little better than the rest was its intense competition along several dimensions (political, economic, technological) both between and within political entities; such a world made creative types too valuable to be liquidated or enslaved. >In a perfectly libertarian society, the bullies would not only take your lunch money, they would murder your family, burn your house, and leave you for dead by the side of the road. This is your free society. Enjoy. And eventually the bullies would run out of prey -- and would have to prey upon themselves. But it would probably not come to that. Anyone with half a brain would have stopped contributing to such a flawed society a long time ago, and maybe even started undermining it, e.g. the USSR.