Loco for liberty: to know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero. (Flashback).(Loco Focos, libertarian group)(Brief Article)

"Walk through Wall Street," commanded a radical journalist of the 1830s, and you will "see a street of palaces." But if the tourist "investigates the sources of their prodigious wealth, he will discover that it is extorted, under various delusive names, and by a deceptive process, from the pockets of the unprivileged and unprotected poor. These are the masters in this land of freedom. These are our aristocracy, our scrip nobility, our privileged order of charter-mongers and money-changers. Serfs of free America! Bow your necks submissively to the yoke, for these exchequer barons have you fully in their power."

The author was just getting warmed up. The lords of Wall Street, he continued, are "low-minded, ignorant and rapacious." They are "aristocrats, clothed with special immunities, who control, indirectly, but certainly, the political power of the state, monopolise the most copious sources of pecuniary profit, and wring the very crust from the hard hand of toil."

This is all very lively prose, you say, but what is so noteworthy about another Marxist denunciation of the boulevard of American capitalism?

Nothing, except that the polemicist in question was not a Marxist but rather the father, or perhaps we should say the eccentric if beloved uncle, of American libertarian journalism, William Leggett of the New York Evening Post. Leggett and his early libertarian comrades, the Loco Focos, remind us that flee-marketeers once regarded Wall Street as the most sinister avenue in America.

Their detestation of the "paper capitalism" of Wall Street was not due to any antipathy to commerce. Leggett's economic views were simple: If we but "leave trade to its own laws, as we leave water to the laws of nature, both will be equally certain to find their proper level."

The problem, however, was that Wall Street was not on the level. It was the product of "special privileges" to the "opulent," of paper money and tariffs and charters of incorporation that gave favored corporations legal advantages, such as limited liability and perpetual life, not available to mere persons.

To Loco Foco thinking, a good dose of free enterprise would fell Wall Street.