I found The Wealth of Nations a very interesting book, although of course eighteenth-century English doesn't bother me in the slightest, & as someone who is apt to slide into obscure byways himself, I am quite tolerant of authors' doing so.
A couple of the points which really stood out to me were his attempt to explain why the Mongols were a terror upon the world, & the natives of North America never could be ; and his blithe assertion that those who would be so foolish as to borrow money for daily needs are few, & those so foolish as to lend to them even fewer.
Definitely, Smith's name is invoked in utterly absurd ways, by people who clearly either never read what he wrote, or have such huge cognitive blocks that they are sure he said whatever they already believed. What most people miss is that he was a professor of Moral Philosophy, the study of how humans relate to one another in society. Economics is, of course, a special subclass of this, for all that most economists try to deny it. (Indeed, Hayek explicitly states that he intends to overthrow all accepted ideas of morality, specifically to destroy "solidarity" & "altruism", because he believes that only atomized individuals guided solely by the market can make what he considers good choices, namely those which would be made by atomized individuals guided solely by the market.) And Wealth can fairly be considered something of a sidelight on his great work, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which most people today have never heard of at all.
Note that David Ricardo, whose name is just behind Smith's in the list of Great Classical Economists, refers to the landlord as the common enemy of all other elements of society. He considers rent on land, passive income which one receives entirely due to the effort of other people, & which is largely arbitrary, to be opposed to productive activity. With the rise of Georgism, starting in California in the late 19th Century, economics texts were hurriedly rewritten to eliminate this idea! This is a prime example of my point that Marx, with his childlike faith in the orderly progress of human affairs, believed that the capitalists had defeated the feudalists (landlords), & all that remained was for the workers to defeat the capitalists ; but in fact the capitalists amalgamated with the landlords. Look at land holdings in the American West & think about it a while.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-07-22 02:11 pm (UTC)A couple of the points which really stood out to me were his attempt to explain why the Mongols were a terror upon the world, & the natives of North America never could be ; and his blithe assertion that those who would be so foolish as to borrow money for daily needs are few, & those so foolish as to lend to them even fewer.
Definitely, Smith's name is invoked in utterly absurd ways, by people who clearly either never read what he wrote, or have such huge cognitive blocks that they are sure he said whatever they already believed. What most people miss is that he was a professor of Moral Philosophy, the study of how humans relate to one another in society. Economics is, of course, a special subclass of this, for all that most economists try to deny it. (Indeed, Hayek explicitly states that he intends to overthrow all accepted ideas of morality, specifically to destroy "solidarity" & "altruism", because he believes that only atomized individuals guided solely by the market can make what he considers good choices, namely those which would be made by atomized individuals guided solely by the market.) And Wealth can fairly be considered something of a sidelight on his great work, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which most people today have never heard of at all.
Note that David Ricardo, whose name is just behind Smith's in the list of Great Classical Economists, refers to the landlord as the common enemy of all other elements of society. He considers rent on land, passive income which one receives entirely due to the effort of other people, & which is largely arbitrary, to be opposed to productive activity. With the rise of Georgism, starting in California in the late 19th Century, economics texts were hurriedly rewritten to eliminate this idea! This is a prime example of my point that Marx, with his childlike faith in the orderly progress of human affairs, believed that the capitalists had defeated the feudalists (landlords), & all that remained was for the workers to defeat the capitalists ; but in fact the capitalists amalgamated with the landlords. Look at land holdings in the American West & think about it a while.