harbingers of the apocalypse
This one goes out to those who continue to misread Adam Smith and claim that the “invisible hand” of the Market will make everything OK. The market doesn’t care about you, your family, or our society. It doesn’t have your interests at heart, and it isn’t in your corner. Why? Because it is amoral. It is thing created by humans that follows its own logic.
And because it is made by us, it can be controlled by us. Want the market to do a better job producing good results for normal people? Then get on board with some sensible regulations. A world where this guy and his friends can do whatever they want is not a world where most people can live.
September 26th, 2011 by graeme |
Caveat: I haven’t read Wealth of Nations, but Adam Smith was pretty much arguing that the invisible hand would make everything okay. It’s hard to really apply a lot of what he was saying to our current day world though. In the age of protectionist guilds and mercantilism, the invisible hand really was making things a lot better.
hi graeme…actually Adam Smith did believe that capitalism should have a moral dimension. That the rich had a responsibility to share their wealth with the less fortunate.
From The Theory of Moral Sentiments which preceded but underpinned his Wealth of Nations:
“In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose … be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society….”
The jungle capitalism of today is a much later invention…
BTW don’t think I’m an economic expert eh? But like Smith I was born in Scotland, so I know more about him than most….