
The Real Adam Smith - nz
https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-smith-actually-believed
======
nwah1
I'm surprised it didn't mention an obvious difference from modern conceptions
of the free market: he thought landownership was a monopoly privilege that
could be taxed without harm, so long as you are taxing only the land rent
itself, not the improvements.

"Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of
houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would
fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a
monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his
ground." \- Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II

~~~
primroot
Smith does not seem to be a private-propery-idealist as almost anyone in the
mainstream today. Take this passage for example, also from book V.

"Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich
man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few
supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the
indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by
envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil
magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the
labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a
single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies,
whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice
he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate
continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and*23
extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil
government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the
value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary.

Civil government supposes a certain subordination. But as the necessity of
civil government gradually grows up with the acquisition of valuable property,
so the principal causes which naturally introduce subordination gradually grow
up with the growth of that valuable property. "

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN20.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN20.html)

~~~
CryptoPunk
Also note this passage, as a counter-point:

>>[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural
selfishness and rapacity…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,
and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

~~~
primroot
Thanks. As the article states, Smith was clearly not some sort of proto-left-
wing intellectual. Here is the source of your quote
[http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS4.html#IV.I.10](http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS4.html#IV.I.10)

Evidently, Smith was unfamiliar with golf courses. I see the whole paragraph
(of your quote) as being even more detached from today's reality than his oft-
cited quote regarding famine and government.

------
yedava
I like to view this another way - too much concentration of power is a bad
thing and we should strive for decentralizing it. So if merchants, in
collusion with the state hold too much power, then the state needs to be cut
down. Conversely if private players accumulate too much power, that too needs
to be cut down, increasing the role of state if necessary.

There is no universal approach that will always be true. Depending on the
circumstances, either a hands off approach to markets or more intervention
from the state is required.

~~~
RobertoG
All that is very nice in theory, but who is doing the "cut down"?

By definition it has to be some entity more powerful that the entity that is
cut down. And who should control that entity but the majority of the society?

So, we finish with the (very imperfect) solution of a democratic government.
We should recognize that it's going to be a lot of interest trying to corrupt
it and we (the people) have to keep watching and steering.

~~~
yedava
I agree it has to be a democracy. The right points to harms of government
overreach to argue for less government. The left points to exploding
inequality and argues for more government in order to tackle it. A good faith
assumption could be that both are trying to decentralize power and maybe
putting it that way will make it easier to reach across the ideological
divide.

~~~
randcraw
I think there's an increasingly compelling argument to be made at this moment
in history, with the rise of powerful increasingly intelligent software that
can 1) rigorously shape policy to ensure that ends are met and that 2) the
means to those ends employ minimal bias, and 3) do so adaptively, shifting
policy dynamically as circumstances evolve. I believe it's time to start
planning for the day when we shutter the voting booths and find a better way
to govern using networked sensors and dispassionate computers.

Democracy is dying. Long live automatic government for the people.

Is this really necessary? IMHO, yes. It's become clear that the easy
manipulation of a gullible, clueless, and intellectually lazy electorate has
broken all three branches of US government:

1) we have an imbecile President and a cabinet of grotesques who border on
insanity

2) we have a congress that for over 30 years has done almost nothing
constructive, that campaigns on one set of principles then serves others, the
primary two being: the financial interests of Those With Money, and paying lip
service to the fantasy-laden desiderata of Those Without.

3) a legal system that imprisons over 90% of those charged _without_ a trial.

What brought America to such a dysfunctional State? The democratic popular
vote, of course. Nothing else could.

Thus I believe it's time there was a serious discussion (outside of
Washington, of course) about alternative ways to shrink and de-bias all three
branches of government, at all levels.

I'm convinced that software soon will be powerful enough to fairly,
effectively, and adaptively guide the players (both citizens and businesses)
in questions of policy to reliably and precisely achieve desired ends, rather
than relying on the venerably bent tools of power -- a gigantic incoherent
mass of self-serving, ends-oblivious, and inconsistent principles chisled into
marble long ago by power brokers to preserve eon-old biases that reliably
serves only vested interests.

If we want AI to reach its true potential, I propose better government be its
ultimate objective. Start from the bottom up -- local government -- and
introduce ends-driven smart services to serve civic and main street business
needs at that level -- where feedback is clearest, most immediate, and most
accountable. This way we might just put government right, from the bottom up,
cutting away Caesar as we go.

~~~
ScottBurson
The idea that AI would rise up and seize power over its human creators has
always seemed preposterous to me. But it is not at all preposterous, as your
comment demonstrates, that we might imagine AI as some kind of savior and put
it in that position intentionally. This is the real danger.

It is a prescription for dystopia. Either the machines, acting without
understanding, will botch things up royally, or unscrupulous people will find
a way to use the machines as cover while they pull the strings to their own
benefit. Or both.

------
metakermit
Nice article – gives a bit more background on Smith's ideas and why it's wrong
to flag him as an absolute free market advocate.

TL;DR – The invisible hand doesn't symbolise the problem of state
intervention, but of state capture (i.e. merchant elites lobbying governments
to protect their monopolies). On the other hand, merchant elites are a
"necessary evil" and the art of good governance is balancing over- and under-
regulating them.

~~~
foamflower
> The invisible hand doesn't symbolise the problem of state intervention, but
> of state capture (i.e. merchant elites lobbying governments to protect their
> monopolies). On the other hand, merchant elites are a "necessary evil" and
> the art of good governance is balancing over- and under-regulating them.

The second sentence is 100% true and completely in line with Adam Smith's
thinking and the overall Scottish Enlightenment.

The first sentence is an accurate summary of the article, but the article is
slightly but profoundly wrong. Smith and his ilk probably would think that the
(modern) idea of "state intervention" vs "state non-intervention" to be silly.
By the time of Ricardo, JS Mill and Marx, "moral philosophers" like Smith were
referred to as "political economists" because they understood that the state
was the base layer on which the rest of society was built. After all, even if
someone is a complete "market fundamentalist" today, he or she still depends
on the state enforcing property rights, enforcing general criminal laws
against theft, murder, rape, etc., and enforcing private causes of action like
torts against neighbors who cause a nuisance, pollute, etc. Were Adam Smith
alive today, he would be in favor of all of those "state interventions" in the
market, as he seems to have been in his own time. (As a parallel, the concept
of "civil society" has followed a similar arc: Originally, Aristotle meant a
community bound under a common set of norms and the rule of law. Over time,
the concept came to mean groups that exist "outside" or exclusive of the
state.)

At the same time, he would have likely been against some of the more heavy-
handed regulatory approaches that modern states use from agricultural planning
to zoning rules, and he would be against them for the same reason that he
disliked the Mercantile System in the 18th century: they give huge advantages
to incumbents, they often fail to solve the problems they are organized to
solve, and they depend on effectively arbitrary rule by the state.

In my opinion, modern thinking has overzealously accepted black-and-white
dichotomies like "for or against state intervention" or defining huge
enumerations of incontrovertible "rights." In reality, the intelligent
question would be (and the one Smith, Hume, et al. seemed interested in), as
your second sentence suggests, "How much should the state intervene so that
outcomes are better than the alternative?"

From the man himself:

> All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus
> completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty
> establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not
> violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own
> interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into
> competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is
> completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he
> must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper
> performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient;
> the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing
> it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.
> According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three
> duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and
> intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the
> society from violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly,
> the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from
> the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of
> establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of
> erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public
> institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or
> small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could
> never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals,
> though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.

------
foamflower
This article is mostly accurate about Smith (although the man himself was much
more favorable to entrepreneurs and innovators than is presented), but fairly
inaccurate that “Right-wing” politics is some perversion of Smith. At the end,
we get a taste of what he means in that Thatcher privatized various state
industries during her run as Prime Minister in the '80s.

Otherwise, an entire sub-field of economics (it would be a sub-field of
"political economy" if that term were widespread today) is Public Choice,
which demonstrates rather well that often state intervention is at the behest
of the "merchant interests." Public Choice is a direct descendent of Adam
Smith’s thinking. Indeed, the very term "state capture" that the author
invokes frequently probably derived from "regulatory capture," a term Public
Choice helped propagate.

There is also a misunderstanding that Smith’s "invisible hand" concept implies
some sort of Utopian paradise, when in fact, Smith meant more that aspiring
monopolists who are nonetheless in competition with each other (and often in
cooperation with others) lead to an increase in social gains, which on its own
seems paradoxical and is highly counterintuitive. Modern economics seems
founded on maximizing or minimizing every possible variable of interest, so I
suppose some people may actually argue that the invisible hand is a statement
about maximization, which it definitely isn’t. In practice, the only people I
see invoke the "Invisible Hand" in this manner are harsh critics of any sort
of free enterprise regardless of the context, and always advocates of state
intervention and thus regulatory capture ("[people] of the system", indeed).

I am most surprised that Smith's sympathies for labor do not appear in this
essay, as they seem to be quite strong. Smith discusses the effects of
specialization that happens during industrialization, and goes so far as to
say it makes workers with repetitive tasks "stupid." In context, his
sympathies are clearly with the worker.

I guess as someone with relatively Smithian-Hayekian views, I am missing the
overall point of this article, other than to hand-wring that so-called
Neoliberalism (I have never met a Neoliberal) is actually unrelated to Smith’s
ideas and are a perversion. He is entirely unconvincing, even if one accepts
for the sake of argument that "neoliberalism" exists as a coherent philosophy
or even ideology (it doesn't).

~~~
YPCrumble
The article gives a good description of a major facet of Neoliberalism: "[a]
movement that seeks (as Thatcher hoped) to ‘roll back the frontiers of the
state". If you have heard someone whining about the nefarious "Big Government"
and the need for deregulation, then you've met a Neoliberal.

The point of the article is summarized by the author in a paragraph:

""" The message that Smith conveys cuts across party and ideological lines,
and applies to both Left and Right. It is about a pathological attitude that
politicians of all stripes are prone to. If not kept in check, this can be the
source not just of disruption and inefficiency but of cruelty and suffering,
when those who find themselves on the wrong side of the plan’s consequences
are forced by the powerful to suffer them regardless. Smith in turn urges us
to recognise that real-world politics will always be too complex for any
prepackaged ideology to cope with. What we need in our politicians is careful
judgment and moral maturity, something that no ideology, nor any position on
the political spectrum, holds a monopoly on. """

The dogma of today's right-wing "mercantile" politicians is a perversion of
Adam Smith. These politicians state that the invisible hand requires complete
government deregulation in order to function. They ignore Smith's point that
the invisible hand requires both free markets and government regulation of
monopoly to function. The article states that "According to Smith, the most
pressing dangers came not from the state acting alone, but the state when
captured by merchant elites." If you've followed US politics at all over the
last year you could see how the article's point is extremely convincing.

~~~
nickik
> then you've met a Neoliberal.

By your definition. But the term has been used for a whole lot more in many
different context and that makes it so useless.

> The dogma of today's right-wing "mercantile" politicians is a perversion of
> Adam Smith. These politicians state that the invisible hand requires
> complete government deregulation in order to function. They ignore Smith's
> point that the invisible hand requires both free markets and government
> regulation of monopoly to function.

No. That's not what they ignore. These "mercantile" politicians never had the
slightest interest in Adam Smiths ideas or in limiting power of the state and
or business in the first place.

The point of Smith and his fellows (like Hume) at the time was that business
would try to capture the state and that was one reason they tried to limited
the power of the state and strengthen individual freedoms. Sure they might
have been in favor of some regulation but what we have now is so far beyond
the wildest dreams of Smith that it is hard to argue that, this is what he
meant.

The problem is that the state is forever growing and that no democratic
procedures can prevent business (and voters) from competing to capture these
rents, rather then the rents from the state.

I would recommend 'Public Choice' economics because they think threw these
different intensives very systematically.

------
vardump
Expected this to be about Chydenius in part, but no:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius#Free_trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius#Free_trade)

"In 1765 Chydenius published a pamphlet called The National Gain (Den
nationnale winsten), in which he proposes ideas of free trade and industry,
explores the relationship between economy and society, and lays out the
principles for liberalism, capitalism, and modern democracy.[5] In the book
Chydenius published theories closely corresponding to Adam Smith's invisible
hand, eleven years before Smith published his book, The Wealth of Nations."

~~~
hyperpallium
fun fact: The expression "invisible hand" does not appear in The Wealth of
Nations, but in Smith's previous work the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

~~~
elcapitan
That is not correct - it appears once in both. Part IV, Chapter 2 in "The
Wealth of Nations" ("and by directing that industry in such a manner as its
produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is
in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end
which was no part of his intention").

------
jeffdavis
"The invisible hand was invoked not to draw attention to the problem of state
intervention, but of state capture"

It's not so easy to separate the two. Intervention tends to have winners and
losers, which make the decision makers a big target for all kinds of
influence.

Especially in a large country like the US, where a single representative (on
average) controls maybe $5B in yearly spending, plus all of the indirect ways
they can pick winners and losers.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to have intervention without capture, but
it's something to be wary of.

Aside: I don't like the word "capture" as though the poor politicians are
somehow kidnapped by evil corporations. I suspect the idea of corruption
usually starts with a politician looking for opportunities to exercise their
power. Then, it quickly becomes a symbiotic relationship.

------
kolbe
I've never been clear on why people who know nothing about Smith other than a
few quotes appeal to his expertise. This article does a little to help, but
really everyone should read Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations
instead of some blog post if they want to be informed on the topic.

------
taw55
When one wants a “real” person or theory, one strays as far as possible from
the unreality-generator that is “academic” economics.

If one would mount an axle on Smith’s grave, we could live off free energy for
millenia.

------
upofadown
It is really hard for even professional historians to gain a good
understanding of old technical works. There is just too much unavailable
context. In the end, you get to ascribe whatever motivations you want by
picking and choosing your quotes. So if Neoliberals want to use The Wealth of
Nations as some sort of theological text, then more power to them. They just
can't use it as some sort of appeal to authority as that particular world no
longer exists. That applies to this article as well.

~~~
namarie
Why do you think historians don't study the context of a particular topic?
They certainly don't pick and choose quotes.

------
RMGgondella
This is certainly a nuanced look at a figure who is generally cited in stark
black and white. The notion of the "merchant elite" setting the tone of
politics within the state -- and with neighbors and other competitors -- is a
bit of a wake-up call. After all, for better or for worse, what finally
dragged the US out of the Great Depression was World War II, and the sudden
bulge of manufacturing it brought.

The question is, are we, today, seeing self-interested corporations
stimulating or antagonizing hard feelings between countries, states, tribes,
or families as a way to push up profits?

And a larger question remains: Is that inherently bad? I suppose that there
are many who would think that it is not, by its nature, bad -- not if your
nation, or ethnicity, or religion is not harmed. I think that this is the
central question the article poses.

Given that, what is the value of a single human life? Or, more broadly, what
is the value of any living thing, or living system? Is it okay kill a man
through black lung, in order to maximize profit from a coal mine? Is it okay
to bulldoze and pave a vast swath of land, to harvest wood, replacing the
forest with a monoculture that will not support diversity? Where does that
end? Is a culture safe? A nation?

There are, of course, a great number of people who think that one life lost is
one too many, that an ecosystem is a living thing, that a culture is sacred.

Smith seems to hew towards regulation of business and industry -- that the
watershed must be considered in mountaintop removal mining, that heroin sales
on the street are not in the best interest of society. (Even though illicit
drug sales are probably the very best example of a truly open and free
market.) I would lean with Smith on this account. Government has NO business
in business. But truly free people must be free to regulate business in their
own interest.

~~~
marnett
Your second paragraph is answered by post-9/11 American foreign policy in Iraq
(to say the least). But just to echo that answer, yes - Halliburton (and
plenty of other private military, security, cyber security service companies)
did and continues to thrive off war profiteering. War is an economy. That's
why the military-industrial complex is discussed so frequently. Not many other
nations subsidize an entire market segment to the tune of hundreds of billions
of dollars a year. One that, again, generates profit off of the selling of
weapons and arms to be used against other human beings.

~~~
RMGgondella
Yes. I agree.

------
CryptoPunk
This is disingenuous in a number of places. For example, it quotes the passage
in the Wealth of Nations warning of collusion between merchants:

>>As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet
together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a
conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’

It uses this as a data point to support the contention that:

>>It is an irony of history that Smith’s most famous idea is now usually
invoked as a defence of unregulated markets in the face of state interference,
so as to protect the interests of private capitalists. For this is roughly the
opposite of Smith’s original intention, which was to advocate for restrictions
on what groups of merchants could do.

Which is absolute nonsense. Sangar omits the context in which the collusion
passage appears. Immediately following that paragraph, we find this:

>>It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either
could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though
the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling
together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to
render them necessary. A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade
in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public
register, facilitates such assemblies. . . . A regulation which enables those
of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their
sick, their widows, and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage,
renders such assemblies necessary. An incorporation not only renders them
necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole.

So Smith very much endorses "unregulated markets in the face of state
interference", which Sagar claims "is roughly the opposite of Smith’s original
intention".

~~~
yesenadam
How on earth do you read that as endorsing unregulated markets in the face of
state interference?

~~~
CryptoPunk
I can't imagine how you don't see it.

All of his warnings are against regulations that make collusion more likely,
and he explicitly says that it would be impossible for any regulation that
would prohibit people from the same trade from meeting to "be executed" or "be
consistent with liberty and justice".

Every single admonishment was against regulations, whether on grounds of
contributing to collusion, or being unenforceable and inconsistent with
"liberty and justice".

~~~
ScottBurson
> Every single admonishment was against regulations

Every single admonishment was against _particular kinds of_ regulations. It's
not at all clear that these amount to an argument against _all_ regulation. In
fact that strikes me as a very odd generalization... like saying "Java sucks
so let's do away with software".

~~~
CryptoPunk
Yes you're right that he criticizes particular regulations in that passage. My
point is that he doesn't endorse any regulations and criticizes several. This
is context in which the passage about collusion between merchants, which
Sangar claims supports his contention that Smith's intention was the
"opposite" of that of modern free market advocates, appears.

That passage in no way conveys a position in opposition to the free market. If
anything, it only supports it.

Moreover, I'd argue statements like "It is impossible indeed to prevent such
meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent
with liberty and justice" take a philosophical position against regulations in
general, and there are many such statements in the Wealth of Nations.

~~~
ScottBurson
> statements like [quote elided] take a philosophical position against
> regulations in general

I don't get that at all. Regulations cover lots of things other than potential
collusion.

~~~
CryptoPunk
I read the "[in]consistent with liberty and justice" quote as a stance against
laws that inhibit the right to associate, and that is very closely related to
the right to freely contract, which the vast majority of regulations inhibit.

If he believed that it would be consistent with liberty and justice to
prohibit certain classes of contracts, he would have simply advocated for a
law against collusion agreements/contracts as the solution to merchants
colluding.

------
paulus_magnus2
Relevant excellent TV series [1]. After Raegan/Thatcher privatization there
was a 2nd wave Clinton/Blaire of liberalisation. The idea was to dismantle
"old hierarchy" / Big Government and replace it with market formed by everyone
maximizing their individual self-interest.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_\(TV_series\))

------
pravinva
The writer tries to pretend that there is something drastically opposite from
knowing that the state captured by business is different from the danger of
mere statism. Well, the answer that preserves liberty is to reduce the chances
of the state being captured. This begins by having a limited govt. If the
madam of the bordello is out of business, there is no need for customers to
line up

~~~
croon
If no one governs your rights/freedoms, you don't have any.

There is no difference between an unchecked corporation and a corrupt state.
The answer doesn't lie at either end, but in a balance.

~~~
IanDrake
That doesn’t make sense, unless you meant...

If one governs your rights, you don’t have any.

Freedom isn’t government granting you rights, it’s government protecting you
from coercion.

If government is the source of your rights, then government can take those
rights away.

If government is the source of protection for your rights, they can only take
that protection away. Leaving you your rights and now full burden of
protecting them.

Corporations don’t have any power without government, which is why a limited
government limits corporate power.

~~~
croon
> Corporations don’t have any power without government, which is why a limited
> government limits corporate power.

They have as much power as they have resources to enforce, which is a lot more
than you have, meaning they have a lot more - and in practice all - power.

> If government is the source of protection for your rights, they can only
> take that protection away. Leaving you your rights and now full burden of
> protecting them.

A governing body is a collective agreement over what rights and freedoms its
members deem fit. If you have none, as you said, you have the full burden of
protecting them. Someone else (in the case of n-1 of all people) will always
have more resources to protect (or impose on others) their freedoms/rights.

You either end up losing your rights/freedoms, or you establish a coalition
with other nearby people, but you won't call it a government, because for some
reason that word is bad.

~~~
IanDrake
Unless corporations have the right to coerce you (which only government can
grant them), they have no power over you.

Walmart is one of the largest corporations around and they have no power over
me. I can voluntarily work or shop there, but they can’t force me to do it.

~~~
optimuspaul
> (which only government can grant them)

You've missed the point, there is no government to grant or revoke anything in
this scenario.

------
nickik
Ah, we have the Adam Smith article again.

As somebody interested in these for many years, there is a periodic rewriting
of this article.

The beats are always the same, Smith not actually like evil neoliberals
(whoever that is) think. He also wrote 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' and so
on. Admittedly this is by far the best one I have seen in many years.

Nothing in the article is really wrong, and it is completely correct the same
analysis Smith used can often be used against people on both sides of
politics.

I would tell people not only to focus on Smith but rather see him in a broader
context with Hume, Ferguson and there English predecessors.

Overall we need to value individual freedom of choice both socially and
economically, we need to strongly protect human rights, the political power
must be limited and so on. Free people working for themselves, their family or
friend, their community can achieve things that are beneficial for all if
these interactions take place in such a framework.

> Thatcher’s restructuring of the economy was as much a product of the ‘spirit
> of system’ as any Soviet strategy

While this critic is certainty true we must also realize that if you accept
Smith and the Scottish ideas, we need to find some way back to the ideas of
individual liberty and limited power of government, specially government and
business working together.

So there is still a very, vary large difference between going towards such a
system or to go towards the Soviet union.

Here is a good podcast about Adam Smith: >
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/06/otteson_on_adam.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/06/otteson_on_adam.html)

~~~
phaemon
From Paul Sagar's bio (the author of this article):

"i am lecturer in political theory in the department of political economy,
king’s college london

i completed my doctorate at the university of cambridge (2014), after
receiving an ma in intellectual history and the history of political thought
from the university of london (2010), and a ba in politics, philosophy, and
economics from the university of oxford (2008). from 2014-17 i was junior
research fellow at king’s college, cambridge. my doctoral thesis centred upon
the political thought of david hume in the context of british debates over the
nature of human sociability and moral psychology. i extended this research in
my recently completed book, the opinion of mankind: sociability and the state
from hobbes to smith, published with princeton university press. alongside my
work in the history of political thought i also research contemporary
political theory. i am in the early stages of researching a second monograph,
which will explore adam smith’s political thought as grounded in his views of
history and commercial society."

(the original is in all caps, hence the lack of capitalisation)

From you: "Nothing in the article is really wrong"

Well, thanks for that. I'm going to take a wild guess that the author knows a
hell of a lot more about Adam Smith than you do, even if you have been
"interested in these for many years".

And I think that applies doubly to the other critics above.

~~~
0xCMP
Hey, this is a discussion forum, so can we please not appeal to authority here
just to say (in so many words) "I don't care what your opinion on this linked
article is because he's an expert and you're not."

What's the point of discussion if you simply say "Oh, but they know more so
just shut up"?

~~~
mikojan
There's nothing wrong with an appeal to authority in response to an appeal to
authority.

~~~
ionised
Why not?

How does a logical fallacy become okay if it is in response to the same
logical fallacy?

~~~
rosser
Appeals to authority aren't necessarily fallacious, if the authority being
cited is _actually an authority_.

~~~
benbreen
Thanks for pointing this out. I appreciate the sentiment behind critiquing a
blind reliance on authority but lately online I've seen a lot of knee jerk
rejections of _any_ authority which I find counter-productive at best. Surely
we can agree that our presence on an online discussion forum doesn't obviate
the fact that some people who have spent years professionally researching a
topic are likely to have a stronger claim to knowing about it than those who
haven't.

------
adynatos
this describes the current "capitalist" system we have today, where powerful
individuals can lobby the state to create laws favouring them directly. the
problem is, of course, the existence of the state.

~~~
RobertoG
Of course.

Maybe you can point us to some examples, current or historical, where human
societies thrived without the existence of the state.

~~~
adynatos
sure:
[http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/faq.html#part17](http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/faq.html#part17)
should i tell you who will build the roads next?

~~~
aidenn0
The bigger issue is that societies organized around a state tend to conquer
societies not so organized, because states are much better at forming armies

~~~
adynatos
so you agree that the state is almost always the initiator of aggression? if
so, it's simply immoral to allow it to exist, just as you wouldn't allow
organized crime to exist. my opinion about the state stems fully from
morality, as presented in the non-aggression principle.

~~~
aidenn0
If you believe in any form of consequentialism, unilaterally disarming is
rarely the moral choice.

~~~
adynatos
of course not, the moral choice is to give everyone equal access to weapons
and military equipment.

