I honestly feel like Smith gets a real bad rap from undereducated progressives. He would also have hated what the United States has morphed into, and I’m sure he’s spinning in his grave over people using his economic theories as justifications for pure laissez-faire capitalism. “The Invisible Hand of the Market” that conservatives use to justify trickle-down economics and often attribute to him isn’t even really his, it’s from a batshit insane later guy called Paul Samuelson! Smith only referred to it in the context of international investments, never this idea that “domestic corporations will always do what is good for the public.”
I don’t agree with everything in Wealth of Nations, but it seems a lot of people just dismiss Smith completely out of hand. We should talk about him just like we talk about Marx, his work is not useless nor trivial.
Amusingly, people who promote capitalism have clearly never read Smith either. Marx wasn’t a departure from Smith, he built directly on the work Smith started. Smith talked about division of labour, and Marx initially used the same term before he started calling it socialized labour. I suspect if most people in the west read Smith today, they’d label him a communist. Consider the following Smith quote as an example:
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.
I honestly feel like Smith gets a real bad rap from undereducated progressives. He would also have hated what the United States has morphed into, and I’m sure he’s spinning in his grave over people using his economic theories as justifications for pure laissez-faire capitalism. “The Invisible Hand of the Market” that conservatives use to justify trickle-down economics and often attribute to him isn’t even really his, it’s from a batshit insane later guy called Paul Samuelson! Smith only referred to it in the context of international investments, never this idea that “domestic corporations will always do what is good for the public.”
I don’t agree with everything in Wealth of Nations, but it seems a lot of people just dismiss Smith completely out of hand. We should talk about him just like we talk about Marx, his work is not useless nor trivial.
Amusingly, people who promote capitalism have clearly never read Smith either. Marx wasn’t a departure from Smith, he built directly on the work Smith started. Smith talked about division of labour, and Marx initially used the same term before he started calling it socialized labour. I suspect if most people in the west read Smith today, they’d label him a communist. Consider the following Smith quote as an example:
i’ve never heard of this guy; do you know where i can find his work?
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300