Economic liberty means both the freedom of earning a decent and sufficient economic income and also the freedom from fear of unemploymentor loss of economic income. It implies, as Tawny says, the absence of such economic inequalities which can be used as means of economic constraint. Laski has defined it thus: “By economic liberty I mean security and the opportunity to find reasonable significance in the earning of one’s daily bread.” Really economic liberty exists only when there is “sufficiency for all before there is superfluity for a few.”
It presupposes, therefore, a society in which there is no class domination and in which economic democracy prevails. Economic democracy means two things: firstly, the possession of economic rights by all citizens, namely, the right to work, right to reasonable hours of work, the right to minimum wage, the right to relief during periods of unemployment, sickness etc., the right to form trade unions, and the right to leisure, and secondly, the share of the workers in industrial organisation.
Its relation to other liberties
Economic Liberty is the precondition of other liberties; none of them can really exist without it. An individual cannot be really free if hunger, starvation and destitution stare him in the face at every step. Nor can there be any liberty when there is a constant fear of unemployment and “insufficiency which, perhaps more than any other inadequacies, sap the whole strength of personality.” Lenin has rightly declared that political or civil liberty is meaningless without economic liberty. The same is true of a nation. It cannot remain free and independent without being economically free and strong. A poor man has no freedom; he lives at the behest of other men, his employers. A poor nation has no independence; it exists at the mercy of its strong neighbours or at the charity of its foreign paymasters. In short, unless and until economic liberty prevails, civil, political and national liberties become illusory.