Tag: Adam Smith

“Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.”

Wendell Berry

“Trickle-down theory – the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”

Upton Sinclair

“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.”

Noam Chomsky

“Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them.”

Adam Smith

“With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.”

Gustave de Molinari

Guest Post by Jeff Thomas via International Man

In 1759, Scotsman Adam Smith, who is widely regarded as the world’s first true economist, published his first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In it, he postulated that all social evolution can be attributed to “individual human action,” as opposed to “individual human design.”

By this, he meant that whatever understanding worked well between any two people was likely to lead to progress. The reason for this was that such agreements would, of necessity, be based upon “trust and empathy.”

He believed that, if mankind were left alone to sort out all commerce and other interaction on their own, using truth and empathy, they’d succeed at moving the society forward.

Continue reading “The Misconception of the “Man of System””

“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Adam Smith

“A pension is not a ‘gratuity.’ A pension is wages you could have taken in cash, but prudently and conservatively set aside for your old age. It’s your money. If your employer, for every pay period, does not set aside and designate it to go into a pension plan, your employer is stealing from you. The way to get this is to require pay stubs to itemize the amount of money that has been contributed to your pension plan.”

David Cay Johnston

“Capitalism is at risk of failing today not because we are running out of innovations, or because markets are failing to inspire private actions, but because we’ve lost sight of the operational failings of unfettered gluttony. We are neglecting a torrent of market failures in infrastructure, finance, and the environment. We are turning our backs on a grotesque worsening of income inequality and willfully continuing to slash social benefits. We are destroying the Earth as if we are indeed the last generation.”

Jeffrey Sachs

“To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature… No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

Adam Smith

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.

We desire both to be respectable and to be respected. We dread both to be contemptible and to be contemned. But, upon coming into the world, we soon find that wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt.”

Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiment

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”

Adam Smith

“Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.”

Adam Smith, The Theory Of Moral Sentiments

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol 1

“In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest.

Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations