Page:The Production of Security.pdf/12

The Production of Security economics, and proceeded logically to ask the question: If the free market can and should supply all other goods and services, why not also the services of protection?

During the same year, 1849, Molinari expanded his radically new theory into a book, Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare, a series of fictional dialogues between three people: the Conservative (advocate of high tariffs and state monopoly privileges), the Socialist, and the Economist (himself). The final dialogue elaborated further on his theory of free-market protective services. Four decades later, in his Les Lois Naturelles de l'Economie Politique (1887), Molinari was still a firm believer in privately competitive police companies, public works companies, and defense companies. Unfortunately, in his only work to be translated into English, La Societé Future (The Society of Tomorrow, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), Molinari had partially retreated to an advocacy of a single monopoly private