Art Carden on Why Capitalism is Unpopular

Art Carden writes in The Market Oracle (HERE):

His article, “Why Is Capitalism So Unpopular?” [abridged drastically below – follow the link] is a tour de force, an imaginative explanation that fits the question with a literate, convincing, and an honest answer. Read the sample and then follow the link.

“Henry Hazlitt once said that good ideas have to be relearned every generation. Among the intellectuals of our time, capitalism is wildly unpopular. This in spite of the fact that it is the only social system that has permitted prosperity and flourishing.

I think there may be a more straightforward explanation that plays a role in their dismissal of capitalism. To a "man of system," to borrow Adam Smith's terminology, capitalism just isn't that exciting. Participants in the market economy are wholly beholden to consumer wants. The academics envision a grand world, where Great Men fight Great Wars, periodically inventing Great Things or developing Great Ideas. Instead, the market provides us with incremental processes, which expend enormous piles of resources, in a quest to make better Triscuits. It is hardly the stuff of high drama, to say nothing of Great History.

The idea that great statesmen are not needed — to say nothing about being wanted — can no doubt be galling to many who decry capitalism for its excesses. For the people who derive their self-worth from being paternalistic, this is a sorry state of affairs indeed.

According to the do-gooders whom Adam Smith called "men of system," the average person is like a piece on a chessboard, to be arranged at the whim of a supervirtuous planner. The planner, who ignores the fact that each of the pieces has (as Smith put it) its own "principles of motion," does his best to orchestrate a game according to his own rules. Dissenters are not tolerated.

Yet people are not chess pieces, to be moved around at will. They are living, breathing, acting, thinking, rational beings with rights and dignity. Respect for their humanity rules out interventions by do-gooders, no matter what their intentions. The result of denying people their fundamental freedoms can be terrible, as the horrors of humanity's 20th-century experiments with collectivism have shown.

Comment
There is much more in Art Carden’s article. I strongly recommend that you read it in full.

Market economies work better than their alternatives and better, in my view than so-called “free markets” where businesses are aided by friends (and, alas, sometimes by clients) in public office. Shutting down state departments of trade and industry, and all lobbying organizations, followed by barring all lobbyists, would be a start towards freer markets.

Of course there is an essential role for government where necessary; defence, justice, public works and public institutions, education and health funding (not always by public provision, but always by voucher schemes), necessary regulation aligned with justice and the separation of powers, and the promotion and defence of personal liberty.

Art Carden’s article deserves the Lost Legacy September Prize, with bar and oak leaf clusters. I for one am truly impressed.

Dangerous Crowds of Activists Gather to Excite Each Other

Sarah Kuck reports on “Using Human Rights Law to Address Climate Change” (29May) in 'World Changing change your thinking’ HERE: in which Victoria Hykes Steere, author of an essay titled “An Iñupiaq Reflection on ‘Ice,’” from Global Warming Reader, by William H. Rodgers, Jr., Jeni Barcelos, Anna Moritz, and Michael Robinson-Dorn, (in press, Carolina Academic Press, Durham). She is also a former law student of William H. Rodgers, Jr., at the University of Washington School of Law, speaks on “What are the legal and human rights implications of climate change?”:

"Our market-based economy owes its existence to Adam Smith and his tract, "The Wealth of Nations." We now must rethink our consumer-based economy. We must learn to share this planet with one another and all animals. The challenge to use climate change to create the opportunity to remake the way we interact with the earth's systems is inspiring. The chance to totally reshape our relationships with the earth, each other and to ensure future generations rarely comes. We must all reach out of our comfort zones and make the message simple. The lives of our children, the oceans, and animals flicker in front of us. Simple is best. Not fear, not anger or guilt but some thing simple and beautiful that we all dream together with the political will to make the dream reality.”

Comment
Victoria begins with an absurdity: ‘Our market-based economy owes its existence to Adam Smith and his tract, "The Wealth of Nations."’ It doesn’t get much better.

The commercial society, of which she refers, was formed long before Adam Smith and 1776. It was active in Britain in the centuries before the 18th century from which emigrants from Britain took with them to North America. It is safe to say that if Adam Smith had never lived, let alone had never written Wealth Of Nations (some ‘tract’ at nearly 1000 pages!), commercial society in what became the United States of America would have continued to flourish, just as it did in Britain and Europe. It does not ‘owe is existence’ to Adam Smith!

If Victoria wants to ‘rethink’ her ‘consumer-based society’, and to urge others to do so, she is free to do so – largely because Britain in Europe had evolved the instruments of liberty (rule of law, independent justice, separation of powers between King and parliament, Habeas Corpus, and private property).

She wants to ‘totally re-shape our relationships with the earth, and each other’, an ambition that is no mean challenge, especially as it requires that ‘we all dream together with the political will to make the dream reality’. I fear that Victoria’s dream hosts the roots of the age of totalitarianism like the world has never seen – and lets face it, the earth has hosted some pretty accomplished totalitarians who were not shy of soaking their dreams in considerable rivers of blood and angst.

And who is to blame for the US predicament? Why a mild, 18th-century moral philosopher, Adam Smith, who never sought to enforce his observations of how the world worked (badly, as it happens) upon anybody. Who sought by his writings in both of his Books, ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ [1759] and ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ [1776], to influence legislators and those who influenced them – he never had a vote under the existing electoral franchise (never forget, liberty is more important than democracy) – to address some important problems that he considered worthy of the early attentions of governments.

He did, however, leave some important messages applicable to Victoria, and all of her ilk at present adding determination to their sense of urgency and pending doom (always a toxic mix for activists).

Smith writes of political activism in Moral Sentiments in two parts. The first is for those whose ‘public spirit’ is ‘prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence’:

“The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.”

The second is for ‘the man of system’ who is ‘apt to be very wise in his own conceit’:

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”
[Both from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Book VI.ii.2:116-17]

If Victoria and her ilk were ever to read Adam Smith’s books, they would learn a lot about the manifest gaps in their education.

Property is Civilisation

Fred Bauer writes (24 May) in the Blog, New Majority.com (‘Building a conservatism that can win again’) HERE:

“Republican Equality

Theories of the free market have long concerned themselves with the role of inequality. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously argues that the development of advanced modes of production and commerce undermined the stark inequalities of the feudal world. The thirst of the rich for luxuries such as diamond buckles led to a breakdown of the system of feudal-agricultural dependence, in which wealthy landholders held not merely economic but also political domination of those below them.

Smith's argument has two salient implications for the current political right/classical liberals/conservatives: (1) certain forms of radical economic inequality can result in significant political inequalities (witness the petty tyrannies of medieval nobles), and (2) the functioning of the free market can serve as a way of mitigating these inequalities, of leading to a turnover of wealth, of making differences in levels of income less poisonous for civil liberties. The free market and inequality thus have a quarrelsome relationship: the market helps create inequalities, but it also undercuts the financial inequality of any given moment, allowing the rich to fall and the poor to rise. Inequality in results is a key characteristic of a market economy, and the very operations of a free exchange can prevent these inequalities from hardening into radical caste differences.

However -- and this is a crucial "however" -- the market itself, particularly in the wake of modern industrialization and certain forms of government intervention, can result in inequalities so vast that they begin to undermine a faith in free markets. And the growth of these radical inequalities can lead to a creeping sense of the hardening of financial differences. If one of the promises of the free market as a vehicle for an authentically liberal-democratic politics is in its ability to allow for social and economic mobility, increasing doubts about the existence of these mobilities also increases doubts about the efficacy of the market and its contribution to political equality. Radical inequalities and a sense of economic stagnation can in turn lead to a widespread rejection of the instruments of the free market and, more broadly, the free society.

The early twentieth century, that high tide of income inequality (the top .1% took home about 10 % of the national income in 1916), was also the high-water mark of the Socialist Party of America; Eugene V. Debs won 6% of the national vote in the fractious election of 1912.

Granted, the rise and fall of the SPA cannot be reduced to that single statistic, but wide income disparities perhaps set some of the conditions for this rise.
Aside from questions about social and economic ideals, this hard practical fact endures: in the modern welfare state, if a great majority believes that it can no longer economically advance, it has the political power to legislate the confiscation via taxation of the wealth of the rich. Now, this confiscation may not succeed in reducing inequality -- the grotesque inequalities of so many "workers' paradises" are built upon the failure of this confiscation to equalize -- but it can still be attempted. In addition to ethical objections about such a policy, a kind of economic hope as well as an economic fear serve to restrain this confiscatory enterprise.

The fear is that such governmental power could be turned against the members of a temporary majority; the hope is that the poor could, too, become rich, so they would want to be able to enjoy their wealth. But at a certain point, the fear of the misuse of power can recede before other, more immediate fears (such as starvation or death of exposure). Social mobility, on the other hand, feeds this hope. If one of the free market's benefits is social mobility, this mobility itself helps increase public support for the free market and protects it from overweening government.

The free market and government regulation are, then, both double-edged entities for issues of inequality. The free market can create radical inequalities through allowing a select coterie to dominate and entrench itself as an economic elite, but it can also unsettle entrenched elites and provide the hope of mobility through an open exchange; governmental regulations can prevent monopolies from forming and ensure limitations on the power of the extremely wealthy, but these very regulations can be tools for the hyper-rich to shut down the market and prevent competition.

Comment
When conservative-minded writers put their minds to work they often produce well thought out ideas. If only they translated into practical politics, but that’s another story.

Adam Smith’s writings on the decline of feudal-property relations in Britain shows an outstanding grasp of history and a deft hand at work, explaining the complex inter-actions between the ruling feudal lords and the newer, lower-order and despised trading merchants. Smith confined his remarks to silver buckle buying by some of the Lords (he lived in a man’s world), but we can be sure that much of the trinkets, brooches, rings, rare perfumes, silks and such like were destined for the Lords’ women.

Smith’s point was that the merchant traders brought luxury goods for the Lords to buy, who were increasingly tempted dispose of the main sources of their political power – their armed retainers – which troubled the leading Lord, the King, and those would-be Kings who eyed their throne, and oppressed the landed workers (hardly, incidentally, a ‘petty tyranny’; it served ‘petty’ ends, no doubt, but was brutal to its victims).

This was a long process, but the end result was an enfeebled aristocracy and a more vibrant merchant core, able to extract concessions from the king in parliament which gave them, eventually, an effective veto over the sovereign’s spending, legitimised by the outcome of a civil war. These Liberties constituted the constitutional monarchy that was 18th-century Britain.

Markets only continue what the consequences of the origination of property did way back in pre-history: create wealth (the 'annual output of the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life' and, inevitably, inequality. The great agricultural societies, growing from a long history of hunter-gatherer subsistence economies from 11,000 years ago in a small segment of the earth’s surface, were noticeable by their inequality, which extended way beyond economic inequality to political and religious inequality. Tribal property in territory preceded family and private property.

The great empires of Egypt, Babylon, India and China, were dominated by ruling elites that managed the hydraulic mysteries and seasonal timings of everything about everyday life for the vast majority of their peoples. The stone detritus of these former stone-built civilisations are spread across the Eurasian continents, north Africa, and in parts of central and south America.

Their predecessor stone-age tool detritus is spread all round the world, into modern times too, which was the subsistence mode of every human society that did not grow into shepherding and farming. Those, few, modern, aimlessly discontented, people who have notions of going back to what they call, the ‘simpler’ life of pre-history, seem to have no idea what that would involve, including the mass extermination of about 6 billion people.

For tens of millennia, the inequality of the world’s population remained constant, with a small elite monopolising the power, and almost everybody else living on subsistence and almost static per capita levels. That is until, again in parts of Europe, commercial society from the 14th century began, slowly, to revive after a thousand years of stagnation, Black Death, endless wars, and social strife, since roughly it was after the fall of the Western Roman empire.

And within four centuries, in Britain, economics, technological and social change, and the unprecedented steady, cinpound interest of the albeit minute rise in per capita incomes finally broke through the petty cycles of the 'Malthusian Trap', ironically almost coterminous with its identification by Thomas Malthus.

These events created social inequalities of a new kind – that between societies that developed institutions capable of ensuring the necessary conditions for continuous, though small, growth rates and those societies – the majority – not capable for various reasons of breaking out of their subsistence economies. The unequal poor in the commercial societies were incomparably better off than those in the unequal traditional societies, claimed Smith in Wealth Of Nations.

It is that comparative inequality that is the distinction brought about by the social evolution of early commercial societies into what became known as capitalism from the mid-19th century. It is a phenomenon that the Left do not acknowledge and the conservatives do not yet accept. There is nothing ordained about the existing arrangements of Big State capitalism or Big Welfare States that will ensure their continuation in their present forms.

The task of the philosopher, said Adam Smith, is to observe and seek to understand; it is not to do anything to intervene with panaceas and social engineering. Philosophers must be wary of becoming 'men (and women) of system' (TMS VI.II.2.17-18: 233-4)

A Left-wing Anarchist Pronounces on Capitalism

Dan Goodman, currently doing postdoctoral research in theoretical neuroscience. Previously a mathematician, still a left-wing anarchist, amateur cook, and philosopher, posts at Le Samovar HERE:

“I wanted to explain why I think capitalism is a bad idea, and hopefully the reasons above do that. I’ve mostly focused on the present, but perhaps a word or two on the past and on the future. After all this criticism of capitalism, it would seem reasonable to respond that capitalism has done a great deal of good too. As Adam Smith says in the first chapter of Wealth of Nations, capitalism has allowed everyone to live better than kings of the past did (I’m paraphrasing here). I think that’s true. One might question whether or not that could have been achieved more expeditiously, but it’s in the past and the question is whether or not we can do better in the future. The Marxist (and some anarchists) would say that how you should organise society depends very much on the level of wealth. A rich society can in principle choose to organise itself in a much more egalitarian way than a poor one can. As our basic needs are provided for to a greater extent, we can stop worrying about living from moment to moment, and focus our attention on reorganising society to be more like how we wish it would be.

Experiments with Communism in the past largely failed for political reasons (democracy is essential), but also because countries that tried it hadn’t reached the point where basic needs were met, and because central planning was an inefficient mechanism (the planners didn’t understand the effects of their actions well enough, nor what was needed). I believe that the time may have come, or at least will quite soon come, when we will have the necessary means (basic needs satisfied, better understanding of economics, decentralised planning mechanisms such as those of parecon or otherwise) to do better than capitalism.”

Comment
Obviously a man who believes that he could re-arrange the ‘wooden pieces on a chess board’ merely by ordaining that it be done, forgetting, as Adam Smith reminds us in Moral Sentiments (TMS VI.ii.2.17: p234), that humans are not wooden pieces easily moved by a some human’s hand; with humans – and there are millions of them -‘each has a principle of movement of its own’.

That road leads to totalitarianism because the ‘man of system’ (in this case Dan Goodman) tries soft, then hard, persuasion, then soft laws and, when they don’t work well or fast enough, imposes harsher and harsher laws, all by necessity delegated to agencies staffed with other humans, who share neither the subtleties nor the shades of humanity that motivated the ‘leader’ in his younger days, and who behave with all the cruelty of the self-righteous on a mission to ‘change the world for the better’ – if only they could see the ‘higher purpose of history’, etc.

It is not democracy that ever fails, should it operate; it is the curbing of Liberty that causes all the problems. Dictators can arrange ‘democratic majorities’ – regular voting took place in all Communist countries, true there were only single party candidates; even Sadam Hussein held ‘elections’ (he ‘won’ them all), as did Mugabe, or his bought and paid for judges said so.

But what no dictator can hide or fool his or her citizens, or the world, about is whether the country is rule by the law, not men, and where Liberty prevails – freedom of assembly, freedom of an independent media, freedom of speech, the right to legal process under an independent judiciary, habeas corpus, trial by jury, and the occurrence of ‘inconvenient’ verdicts – the evidence is beyond doubt.

Dan writes: “As Adam Smith says in the first chapter of Wealth of Nations, capitalism has allowed everyone to live better than kings of the past did (I’m paraphrasing here)”. but, as always, the devil is in the detail.

Smith’s actual quotation is:

“Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages”. [WN I.i.11: p24]

Dan should note there is no mention of ‘capitalism’ (a word invented in English in 1854 and therefore unknown to Adam Smith who died in 1790). Smith wrote about ‘commercial society’, not capitalism, which was back-projected onto Adam Smith and the 18th century by modern economists, apparently more interested in politics, disguised as economic theory, than in historical accuracy.

The Philosophy of 'Outrage'

Josh Cohen is quoted by John Perry for Philosophy talk: the Blog (HERE):

“For much of the past century, the idea of a political philosophy devoted
to both liberty and equality seemed to many people a contradiction in terms. Outraged by vast differences between the lives of rich and poor, egalitarians condemned the classical liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith for giving undue attention to legal rights and liberties, while remaining indifferent to the fate of ordinary people. Traditional liberalism, they complained, prized equality before the law, but showed complacency in the face of profound and grim inequalities of fortune on earth.

Classical liberals, in contrast, embraced personal liberty, and condemned egalitarians for their paternalism and willingness to sacrifice human freedom in the name of some possible future utopia.”
(From "The Importance of Philosophy: Reflections on John Rawls
S. Afr. J, Philos. 2004, 23(2))

Comment
John Perry reports the views of Josh Cohen and prefaces the quotation with his own statement:

“Rawls changed all that with A Theory of Justice. The importance of this book in starting a new era of political thought and re-invigorating the whole ethical side of philosophy in America cannot be overestimated.”

It is not my brief to dispute the assertions of modern-day moral philosophers but it is to challenge the things they say about Adam Smith (I am not concerned with the views of John Locke on this occasion).

“egalitarians condemned the classical liberalism of …. Adam Smith for giving undue attention to legal rights and liberties, while remaining indifferent to the fate of ordinary people.”

This is a curious sentence. It signifies a profound difference between 18th-century moral philosophers and their modern equivalents, living in secular democracies without the non-trivial tyrannies of an Established Church, and with a Bill of Rights protecting their freedoms to be ‘outraged’ and inform anybody who listens to their views about the world as it is and how they would have it changed. These freedoms were not available to Adam Smith and he was not protected from the long-reach of the powers of the sovereign state that decided what was permissible and what was punishable.

Brave souls sitting in the comforts of 21st-century affluence and Human Rights laws should, perhaps, be humble when condemning their predecessors who didn’t even have a right to vote under the existing franchise, let alone the freedom to be ‘outraged’. Adam Smith observed and wrote about the problems of society within the ‘rules’ of discourse prevalent in his day, and any reading of Wealth Of Nations cannot fail to impress just how much he highlighted the problems of the poverty of the majority of people in British society.

Adam Smith openly stated his role as a philosopher was to ‘do nothing and observe everything’, which he did in all his Works, often resorting to a device that exposed the many flaws in human conduct by appending them to historical figures, not their contemporary examples, which allowed him to condemn ‘vile rulers’ in the past, but who were also clearly present in his day, and at the same time to comment upon would-be radical reformers who conceived of ‘schemes’, ‘plans’, ‘utopias’, and fully worked-out futures to relieve humanity from its manifest burdens.

Egalitarians who were ‘Outraged by vast differences between the lives of rich and poor’ (in which particular and unique age are we thinking of’? Is it in the 18th-19th-20th or 21st century?) wanted Adam Smith to do what?

Smith’s task as he saw it was to observe how society arrived at where it was in 18th-century Britain and point out where and why it was deficient. If the measures he painstakingly analysed were ‘slowly and gradually’ changed, he believed there would be a spread of opulence to the poorest ranks of society, which arguably was the right thing to do in mid-18th-century Scotland.

Coming from Scotland, which for centuries embroiled itself in bloody dynastic turmoil and, recently in his lifetime (1745-6), had rebelled in pursuit of its last dynastic war with disastrous consequences for all concerned, he was ever mindful of the price paid by the ordinary folk for instant solutions to ancient problems proposed by the ‘outraged’ prophets touting future remedies.

He summed up his rejection of what he called ‘the man of system’ and prefaced his remarks with his own philosophy for “slow and gradual change” to ameliorate the poverty of the many from the spread of that necessary opulence so beyond the reaches of those who lived without it as things stood:

“The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence.

When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy and law, may no doubt be necessary for directing the views of the statesman. But to insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all at once, and in spite of all opposition, every thing which that idea may seem to require, must often be the highest degree of arrogance. It is to erect his own judgment into the supreme standard of right and wrong. It is to fancy himself the only wise and worthy man in the commonwealth, and that his fellow-citizens should accommodate themselves to him and not he to them. It is upon this account, that of all political speculators, sovereign princes are by far the most dangerous. This arrogance is perfectly familiar to them. They entertain no doubt of the immense superiority of their own judgment. When such imperial and royal reformers, therefore, condescend to contemplate the constitution of the country which is committed to their government, they seldom see any thing so wrong in it as the obstructions which it may sometimes oppose to the execution of their own will. They hold in contempt the divine maxim of Plato, and consider the state as made for themselves, not themselves for the state. The great object of their reformation, therefore, is to remove those obstructions; to reduce the authority of the nobility; to take away the privileges of cities and provinces, and to render both the greatest individuals and the greatest orders of the state, as incapable of opposing their commands, as the weakest and most insignificant” TMS VI.ii.2: pp 233-34; 1872 ed. Kessinger Rare Reprints, pp 207-08).

John Perry and Josh Cohen may differ vigorously with Adam Smith on the appropriate actions that should be taken in face of society’s manifest ills and outrages, but they are woefully unfair, inaccurate and unjust in accusing Adam Smith of “remaining indifferent to the fate of ordinary people”.

He lived in a society with far deeper poverty, broken hearts, and shorter, miserable lives than anything that graduates of Harvard are ever likely to experience. But he was never indifferent to what he observed.