Wealth of Nations is surprisingly left-wing when you actually read it. Smith would probably be something like a social democrat if he were alive today.
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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A lot of it is "We don't need top-down aristocratic control because people can order their own affairs; watch me describe how people make perfectly cooperative market transactions even though businessmen are conspiratorial shits", and somehow now 'capitalists' who haven't read it think it's "CAPITALISM MEANS ARISTOCRACY IS GOOD, ACTUALLY"
I guess there are always defenders of the aristocracy, in every age, no matter what form it takes or what name it claims.
He even talks about how government itself was built to protect the rich from the poor. It's practically Marx verbatim.
Marx even openly credits Smith with doing important work in the field, albeit in a "He was SO close, but just missed the most essential point of all" kind of way, and freely quoted him.
Almost like Marx was an academic operating with the thinking of an academic - that new thought is built upon previous discoveries - instead of the weird tribalist 'My scripture GOOD, their scripture BAD' stuff people want to engage in.
Well, Marx drew more from Ricardo who was himself building upon Smith's work, but yes they were certainly part of the same continuum that arguably runs today through people like Graeber (pbuh) and Piketty.
Flip flop, chronologically
I think it's more that the natural emergent properties of a large number of agents interacting (like "the invisible hand of the market") sounded a lot like "the hand of God"
It's a pretty complex topic to put into words, and he was explaining self governing economic forces to people who had never heard of anything like that before... He was very carefully trying to avoid any religious or mystical implications, which makes everything come off awkwardly to an audience that understands these concepts already
Yep so many of these ideologies just completely ignore or fail to account for basic human behavior. Or acknowledge just how irrational people can be.
I'd say aristocracy and monopolist anti-regulationism are both extreme (= violent) forms of classism.
I would agree.
Some people are born with a taste for boot
Reminds me of the subreddit r/austrian_economics in a nutshell. Even if you are not saying capitalism is bad, but merely pointing out where laissez faire capitalism is not nearly as good as advertised will get you branded a communist. Like tankies, but for capitalism.
God, the Austrian Cult of Economics is bizarre. My favorite part is where they explicitly reject evidence, conceptually ('praxeology').
Love that one. "Evidence disagrees with our theories? Don't worry, we have a theory for that! It's actually the evidence that's wrong."
Generally, you shouldn't brag that your theories are unfalsifiable.
Austrian economics is to economics what flat earth is to physics. Really anything useful that austrians contributed has made its way into modern econ101; everything else got left behind, so it is curious why someone wants to keep the school (its not but its a good rhetorical question)
I do love to ask them what government regulations forced xyz company to do this or that unethical thing that they have a monetary incentive todo. Its a whole missing the forest for the trees kind of discussion.
So, what you've realised is no matter what ism or where, people are idiots and love tribes.
I don't like the tribe of misanthropy.
"They're providing housing!"
No. Construction, maintenance and infrastructure workers, planners and credit unions are, landlords merely fill the organisational power vacuum that cooperative or social housing would fill. Owning isn't labour.
The modern version of rent seeking is far darker. Neither of these guys could have ever dreamed how far capitalism has gone with rent seeking.
Not trying to defend landlords but rent seeking is not what landlords do by default. Rent seeking is oddly enough not the same as trying to rent something for use.
Rent seeking is going to extra effort or expense to disallow use of something that would normally be usable without extra cost. So if a landlord installed locked shutters on the windows and charged you extra to remove them for a delux view that would be rent seeking.
Again not defending landlords. It's just a ergonomic term that doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.
Not all rental is rent-seeking behavior, but landlords as a class almost always engage in rent-seeking behavior. Rent-seeking is not necessarily about allowing or disallowing, but about extracting wealth without commensurate improvement in productivity or value that would justify it.