In the last 250 years, free-market ideology has played a central role in the development of the logic and rhetoric that have influenced the daily life of populations throughout the world. It was cornered for a few decades during the twentieth century in favor of a social economy for the public interest, and then returned to the limelight in the last thirty years of the century to dominate the logics that drive world economies, doing the favor of the elites at the expense of 99%. Through the testimony of six people informed about the facts, Laissez-faire offers a historical and ideological perspective through which to identify the fundamental problems of the economic mechanism on which societies are based.
The film depicts the lives of veterans of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution in the American Civil War, based in part on an Ambrose Bierce story. The whole film was re-edited using his own method called "light editing" in order to make it resemble a damaged silent film from the late 1800s.
