Wealth of Nations is surprisingly left-wing when you actually read it. Smith would probably be something like a social democrat if he were alive today.
A lot of it is “We don’t need top-down aristocratic control because people can order their own affairs; watch me describe how people make perfectly cooperative market transactions even though businessmen are conspiratorial shits”, and somehow now ‘capitalists’ who haven’t read it think it’s “CAPITALISM MEANS ARISTOCRACY IS GOOD, ACTUALLY”
I guess there are always defenders of the aristocracy, in every age, no matter what form it takes or what name it claims.
Marx even openly credits Smith with doing important work in the field, albeit in a “He was SO close, but just missed the most essential point of all” kind of way, and freely quoted him.
Almost like Marx was an academic operating with the thinking of an academic - that new thought is built upon previous discoveries - instead of the weird tribalist ‘My scripture GOOD, their scripture BAD’ stuff people want to engage in.
Well, Marx drew more from Ricardo who was himself building upon Smith’s work, but yes they were certainly part of the same continuum that arguably runs today through people like Graeber (pbuh) and Piketty.
I think it’s more that the natural emergent properties of a large number of agents interacting (like “the invisible hand of the market”) sounded a lot like “the hand of God”
It’s a pretty complex topic to put into words, and he was explaining self governing economic forces to people who had never heard of anything like that before… He was very carefully trying to avoid any religious or mystical implications, which makes everything come off awkwardly to an audience that understands these concepts already
Wealth of Nations is surprisingly left-wing when you actually read it. Smith would probably be something like a social democrat if he were alive today.
A lot of it is “We don’t need top-down aristocratic control because people can order their own affairs; watch me describe how people make perfectly cooperative market transactions even though businessmen are conspiratorial shits”, and somehow now ‘capitalists’ who haven’t read it think it’s “CAPITALISM MEANS ARISTOCRACY IS GOOD, ACTUALLY”
I guess there are always defenders of the aristocracy, in every age, no matter what form it takes or what name it claims.
He even talks about how government itself was built to protect the rich from the poor. It’s practically Marx verbatim.
Marx even openly credits Smith with doing important work in the field, albeit in a “He was SO close, but just missed the most essential point of all” kind of way, and freely quoted him.
Almost like Marx was an academic operating with the thinking of an academic - that new thought is built upon previous discoveries - instead of the weird tribalist ‘My scripture GOOD, their scripture BAD’ stuff people want to engage in.
Well, Marx drew more from Ricardo who was himself building upon Smith’s work, but yes they were certainly part of the same continuum that arguably runs today through people like Graeber (pbuh) and Piketty.
Flip flop, chronologically
I think it’s more that the natural emergent properties of a large number of agents interacting (like “the invisible hand of the market”) sounded a lot like “the hand of God”
It’s a pretty complex topic to put into words, and he was explaining self governing economic forces to people who had never heard of anything like that before… He was very carefully trying to avoid any religious or mystical implications, which makes everything come off awkwardly to an audience that understands these concepts already
Yep so many of these ideologies just completely ignore or fail to account for basic human behavior. Or acknowledge just how irrational people can be.
Some people are born with a taste for boot
I’d say aristocracy and monopolist anti-regulationism are both extreme (= violent) forms of classism.
I would agree.