The Atlantic has an article named The Problem With Inequality, According to Adam Smith. One paragraph reads:Yet there remains a broad consensus, even among scholars of the period, that Smith was concerned by poverty but not by economic inequality itself. According to this view, Smith hoped to ensure that all members of society could satisfy their basic needs, but he was untroubled by relative differences in income and wealth. As long as everyone has food on their tables, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads, the thinking goes, it does not matter if some have far more than others. Indeed, it is often claimed that Smith saw economic inequality as a manifestly good thing.
I have pointed out in 2012 that the Prometheus edition of “The Wealth of Nations” is abridged and that a major quote from book 5, chapter 1 is missing:Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.This is only one sentence from some longer paragraphs that Smith has on the the sovereign….
People who quote others should actually read them.
The Atlantic on Adam Smith and inequality miss major quote
Dirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin
2 comments:
I don't see the disconnect Tom?
He just saying that govt enforces property laws....
Did you "inequality!" people ever think you look like you are trying to save these materialistic people from "hell!" like the evangelicals going all around trying to save the homosexuals?
That's what you look like...
Smith: Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Matt: He just saying that govt enforces property laws....
Yes, for the defense of the rich over the poor.
Reading the whole piece, Smith is talking about how enclosure of the commons came about historically. He is saying that it was based not on fairness based on use (Locke's just so story) but on power relationships, He is locating the development of feudalism is animal husbandry rather than agriculture as working the land.
Smith's target as a classical liberal was the feudal aristocracy of his day that extracted rents from land ownership without doing anything productive.
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