Posted on 07/08/2008 8:35:39 AM PDT by Wendolyn128
“Adam Smith is often wrongly seen as the patron of free market capitalism without a conscience.” -- Gordon Brown, Prime Minister (Labour Party)
I just celebrated the most unusual 4th of July fireworks I’ve ever experienced -- in Edinburgh, Scotland, where Nobel Prize economist Vernon Smith unveiled a giant statue of Adam Smith, on Royal Mile Road.
For decades, Marxists and socialists could go to the Highgate Cemetery in London and honor their patron saint, Karl Marx. Now, finally, we free-marketers can make our own pilgrimage to Edinburgh and worship our own hero to free-market capitalism.
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
Interesting. So, according to Gordon Brown, when Adam Smith speaks of the “invisible hand”, he is referring to the dictatorship of the proletariat?
In practice, Marxism usually turns out to exploitation without a conscience. I have seen varying degrees of socialism around the world and, in practice, government control serves to benefit one elite or another while economic freedom works to "lift all boats". In a Marxist paradise, the poor are kept poor with no hope of ever bettering their lot by their own efforts.
In Adam Smith’s construct, for capitalism to work well all parties must be on equal footing - in terms of risk, need and power. Once that balance goes out of whack, then capitalism fails.
If you look at the subprime mess, the driving force behind that was the unloading of risk to the opposite ends of the supply chain, everybody in the middle would get paid (Mortgage Brokers, Underwriting banks, Bond Rating Agencies, and Portfolio & Fund Managers) but the risk was held exclusively by the homeowner and the remote investor.
How can anyone justify statism and government intervention in the market place through the founding ideas of capitalism? They’re opposed to each other no matter how many selective and isolated out-of-context quotes you take. Communists.
Well here again the Libs try to re-write history.
But it was a time when 'energy' came from human muscle, horses or draft animals, wind or a mill pond (water)
But now we have a bottleneck in energy ... totally irrational human decisions causing it and the market is responding.
Smith thought humans were better than that.... gave the market too much power to balance irrational thinking. Referring to the envior0-whack0s of course.
When I was in college the name Adam Smith was a dirty word. Even my econ prof dismissed Smith’s free-market stance as too right-radical. Actually Smith’s positions were hardly discussed at all. It was assumed that true free-market economics were just so heartless. I wonder what effect a real exposition of Smith’s book would have had on students. In leftist academia, Smith never had a chance.
Well said Gordon!
The put down of the An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by shortening this work to be nothing more than an impersonal invisible hand devoid of God and Morals is false leftist sentimentality being called forth to dismiss the antidote to socialism and Godless morality that this work truly was. It is certainly not devoid of God or Morals and addresses those issues in depth.
Wealth was issued in 1776, but Smith was more known in his own time as a Philosopher and a professor of morals and ethics based upon his collection of lectures and essays from his long instruction in the field of moral philosophy. That work, The Theory of Moral Sentiment called forth belief and religion as good and necessary conveyances of morals and right behavior.
While not a religionist himself, he saw the need and necessity of the Religious in public life and, like Hayek, defended it without delving in theology.
If the enlightenment would have ended with the early Scottish and English figures such a Smith and the other empiricists and the French rationalist imitators had never come along with their metaphysical abstractions, the world would have been a better place.
see my #9
In Adam Smith's time, hereditary class privilege was a major political issue. Obviously, free-market capitalism, being meritocratic, doesn't gibe well with that, and opposing it would thus make Smith "radical" and "egalitarian" in that context.
Obviously, this has nothing to do with modern leftist radicalism and egalitarianism, and the pretense that it does is nothing more than a cheap three-card monte scam.
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