The aff’s forceful control over economic activity stretches government power beyond economic restraints as a supervisor into a dictator, leaving power unchecked (I/L maybe? )

Following Smith’s claim about the duty of political economy as to “architect and rationalize politics that aimed at the opulence of the nation and its population” (Citation1976, 428), it is possible to see how classical political economy acquired a normative tone beyond the restrictive analysis of economic information, thus addressing a strategic role to governmental policies. Once economic ideas reached governmental level of action, economic liberalism was adopted as a “technology of government”, transforming the markets, utility and interests as self-limiting principles of governmental reason. This represented the empowerment of the liberal art of government and the provision of the idea of “frugal government” (Foucault Citation2008): the state replaced the establishment of its principles, actions and reasoning through concepts of power, laws, wealth and strength by the restriction of the power of the state based on economic rules, principles and actions. Economic principles now represented a set of mechanisms that allowed the restriction of the state:

The market determines that a good government is no longer quite simply one that is just. The market now means that to be good government, government has to function according to truth. […] Political economy was important, [because] it pointed out to government where it had to go to find the principle of truth of its own governmental practice. […] The market must tell the truth (‘dire le vrai’); it must tell the truth in relation to governmental practice. (Foucault Citation2008, 32)

When the knowledge created by political economy consolidated the ideas of the mechanism of markets and natural price, not only did it have an impact on economic theory and epistemology, but it also deeply affected governmental practices, thus changing social reality. The idea that “natural economic forces” would lead to desirable results in the market promoted a change in governmental practices, which shifted from the focus on issues of law, justice and national opulence to the primary economic supervision of markets. Thus, the duty of the state was to supervise the functioning of market relations and to ensure the freedom of the agents within the economic scenario not by intervening in the economy directly, but by preserving the interests, trades and economic processes.

An extract from an 18th century edition of the Evening Mail (London) described how the state should perform as a supervisor when managing the society and the economic reality:

[We are] now at a period in the life of society when commercial knowledge had risen to perfection, and when it was demonstrated by daily practice that more advantages were derived from unrestrained modes of barter and exchange, than from any regulation which the limited understandings of a Legislature could devise. (The Evening Mail Citation1797, 3).

The constitution of a specific form of power in the end of the 18th century was defined by a liberal art of government which emerged from two forces: first, the knowledge theorized by political economists, and secondly, the consolidation of market forces as a system of truth which demanded a different function to state. Once markets were believed to be a part of a “natural” and “truthful” regime, the role of the state changed from an intervener to a supervisor. Introducing liberal economic principles within the sphere of actions of the state led to a redesign of its practices, especially regarding the treatment of the population. Justice, security, freedom, education, health and wellbeing became part of a policy agenda which differed completely from the old mercantilist “state of police”, allowing for a new technology of power to emerge that had unique political and social consequences to the management of individuals and populations: biopolitics.