Given these institutional limitations on authority, can it be said that the government of the United States historically followed a policy of laissez-faire? Perhaps, but only as measured against Soviet-style command economies or the statist developmental policies of Napoleonic France, Bismarckian Germany, or Meiji Japan. Compared with liberal regimes such as that of Victorian Britain, the American government violated laissez-faire as often as it practiced it.

Broadly speaking, both federal and state governments were active in the economic sphere during the first half of the nineteenth century, passive in the second half, and then active again throughout the twentieth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, state governments chartered numerous banks and expended public funds liberally for internal improvements such as canals, turnpikes, and railways. Meanwhile, the federal government promoted agricultural exports, protected domestic industry through tariffs, subsidized commerce through a generous postal rate structure, and encouraged the building of railways. Equally important, and often overlooked in analyses of government-business relations, the national government pursued an energetic and relentless policy of land acquisition and development. During the nineteenth century, more individual Americans made their fortunes from the exploitation of newly annexed lands than from any other source. «Manifest destiny» was an operative economic policy as well as a slogan of nationalism and empire, as the geographical extent of the United States was multiplied severalfold by the addition of the Old Northwest, the Louisiana Purchase, the Florida Cession, the Mexican Cession, the Gadsden Purchase, the Oregon Territory, and the acquisition of Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii.

In less visible ways, the legal order of the United States was shaped so as to lubricate the operations of private enterprise. Decade by decade, the states relaxed requirements for the privilege of incorporation, far in advance of parallel developments in Europe. In bankruptcy law, incentives were fashioned so as to favor debtors more than creditors, a reversal of common European practice. Similarly, contract law became highly refined in America, facilitating commerce among the disparate populations of strangers who came to American shores and pushed ever westward. Meanwhile, taxation remained light, a circumstance made possible by ample revenues from the sale of public lands and from customs duties on goods imported from Europe. All of this added up to a situation uncommonly hospitable to what the legal historian Willard Hurst has called «the release of energy.» Policymakers had systematically designed a fertile setting for private entrepreneurship – a greenhouse for business. So long as individual companies stayed small, no real conflict between the welfare of the American people and that of its business units became serious. Unfortunately, that happy situation endured only until the 1880s.

Big business (trusts) appeared in the United States during that decade, a good deal earlier than in most other countries. Once established, it grew faster and to a larger size than it did elsewhere. One reason was the absence of any countervailing force in America. A new country made up entirely of immigrants (except for the Native Americans), the United States had no established church, no standing army, no hereditary aristocracy, no mandarin class, no feudal tradition. Because of the nation’s individualistic ideology, almost no government ownership of business enterprise existed, in contrast to substantial public undertakings even in other market economies, let alone socialist ones. The exceptions to this rule became famous largely because they