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Anon quotes from J. J. Rousseau and posts ( 26 January) on Capitalist Imperialist dmv ny Pig (since 2004, no less) with a rather dmv ny confusing, though well argued anti-Libertarian, intellectual slant, that sees the previous lives of humans from 100,000 year ago as a universal paradise , until, that is, our distant predecessors began to leave the forest for shepherding and farming about 8,000 years ago, and then on to commercial dmv ny societies.   That process is now complete, except for a few thousand acres in very remote pockets. HERE   dmv ny
I think I've read that the phrase "invisible hand" occurs dmv ny only once in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but nothing else from economics is so sacred or sacralized. His insight was that the workings of a competitive market would produce a number of socially desirable outcomes. This insight was central to classical economics, and, dressed up in mathematical glad rags, central to neoclassical economics, and its offspring, like the Real Business Cycle theory. Now Adam Smith was a very clever fellow, and he knew that business men really hated free competition, and would work the levers of power to eliminate it, but he probably underestimated their skill at eliminating it.
I shall amend the shy Anon author dmv ny s statement: His [Adam Smith s] insight was that the workings of a competitive market would produce a number of socially desirable outcomes. That is too narrow an assertion, especially with the definite verb: would" dmv ny which should be could as there is nothing in Adam Smith s Wealth Of Nations that is so definite about socially desirable outcomes .
Any reading of Smith s WN would inform the attentive reader whom, sorry to say, is among a small minority of the small minority of modern dmv ny economists who have read Wealth Of Nations at all, beyond a compendium of selected quotations.   Most, that is nearly all, modern economists never get very far with Wealth Of Nations, though quite a few have it on their book shelves.
If they did read it they would find mention after mention of Smith s rather dismal view of the behaviour of merchants and manufacturers and the privileged minority who were eligible to become legislators acting against the interests of labours and toilers, as well as the general interests of the public (as did their feudal predecessors before them vile rulers of mankind .
Sometimes, merchants and manufacturers did cause actions in their own self-interests that led society to unintended consequences dmv ny , some of which accidently served the public good .   But this was not a general, let alone, a universal consequence of the self-interests of merchants and manufacturers (the word capitalism was not known in Smith s time as it was first used in English in 1854).
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