A Misuse of Adam Smith's Work

In Alternet, San Francisco, Sean Gonsalves, of the Cape Cod Times has a piece syndicated, about President Bush and the ‘breakdown of government’ in the Katrina emergency. Without wishing to comment on the internal affairs of the USA, I am, however, concerned at the misuse of Adam Smith in Sean Gonsalves’s case.

He writes (in an excellent example of a knock-about columnist at work):

“Tell me that our market morality, with its slavish and idolatrous commitment to ''division of labor'' abstractions, hasn't reached the point where people are human robots unable to do the right thing without first getting an order to act?
Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, warned us about this kind of thing in ''The Wealth of Nations'' - something that laissez-faire free-market cheerleaders conveniently skip over.
Smith recognized that ''the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments.''
And, he wrote, ''the man whose life is spent performing a few simple operations...has no occasion to exert his understanding...and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be.''
But Smith, a distinguished moral philosopher (not an economist) by profession, doesn't advise the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps canard.
The ''great body of people'' cannot avoid such mind-numbing effects, Smith wrote, ''unless government takes pains to prevent it.''
Stop the blame game? Sorry, but that doesn't butter the biscuit.”

The division of labour is not an ‘abstraction’ – Gonsalves writes his piece and other people turn it into a printed column and syndicate it.

In the history of the USA there is a strong line of legal precedence about the division of powers (even labour) between what the Federal Government may legally do and what State and local governments may do. Sean Gonsalves should know that. Hence, it is the case that Federal Government is “unable to do the right thing without first getting [or giving] an order to act?”

You can argue that Katrina was such a bad situation that the President should have ignored legal protocol (and, no doubt, the strong advice of his legal counsel apart from his political instincts - he had, after all, been a Governor of a State himself) and gone in over the head of the State Governor and the Mayor of New Orleans. But ‘hard cases make bad law', and given the blood spilled over the contest between State rights and Federal powers, it caused its own paralysis, apart from any cases of incompetence there may have been in those early hours and days. I am not sanguine about the correlation between government and incompetence.

Adam Smith was not the ‘Father of Capitalism’ and never advocated laissez faire. That was the next century, not Smith’s, and so what “laissez-faire free-market cheerleaders conveniently skip over” is not relevant to Gonsalves case against President Bush.

Gonsalves says that Smith recognized that ''the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments.'' Indeed, he did say that in “Wealth of Nations” (Book V.i.f.50, pages 781-2) but, er, what has this to do with President Bush (who is certainly not confined in his daily work to “a very few simple operations”, plus his access to scores of advisors)? And the same applies to his gratuitous use of the sentence: ''the man whose life is spent performing a few simple operations...has no occasion to exert his understanding...and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be.''

Gonsalves adds: ‘The ''great body of people'' cannot avoid such mind-numbing effects, Smith wrote, ''unless government takes pains to prevent it.'' Again, what has this to do with the Katrina situation?

The division of labour that Smith wrote about (which was a well known phenomenon long before Smith wrote about it) in “Wealth of Nations” (Book I, Chapter 1) in great detail, refers to a single purpose form of labour, so simplified, that a labourer increase productivity significantly in collusion with others, albeit with the side-effect costs alluded to in the chapter Gonsalves quotes from Book V.

But even here I am not sure Gonsalves uses Smith’s point correctly. Smith was making the case for general elementary education provision for the children of common labourers. The more negative consequences of the division of labour he alludes to in Book V (in contrast to his praise of it in Book I) were the problem that they made young men less suited to the ‘martial’ spirit necessary for the defence of the country. It was this problem that needed government intervention in the form of funding elementary schools (always with some contribution financially from parents).

It had nothing to do with the potential need for government intervention over the heads of State Governors and City Mayors in the case of an emergency. Does Sean Gonsalves realise what he is suggesting when he demands that the US President should march in and take over the powers of a State (which the US President does not have and is unlikely every to get a Congress to accept). The fact that President Bush ignored the UN in the decision to go to war with Iraq is easily explained: there was nothing really that the UN could do to the US – which would veto any resolution to do anything about it at the UN Security Council. But there is plenty that the US Supreme Court (and the opposition democrats, and rival Republicans) could do against the President in such a blatant breach of the US Constitution.

If I had to spell the details out out to Sean Gonsalves (which I doubt), he would have no business being a columnist.