Trade regulations such as the limitation of apprenticeship he condemned as "manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of the workman and of those who may be disposed to employ him." Even educational establishments are suspect on the ground--not unnatural after his own experience of Oxford--that their possibilities of comfort may enervate the natural energies of men.
The key to this attitude is clear enough.

The improvement of society is due, he thinks not to the calculations of government but to the natural instincts of economic man.

We cannot avoid the impulse to better our condition; and the less its effort is restrained the more certain it is that happiness will result.

We gain, in fact, some sense of its inherent power when we bear in mind the magnitude of its accomplishment despite the folly and extravagance of princes.

Therein we have some index of what it would achieve if left unhindered to work out its own destinies.
Human institutions continually thwart its power; for those who build those institutions are moved rather "by the momentary fluctuations of affairs" than their true nature.