Quotes About Adam Smith

A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures.

Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.

The part of capitalism that doesn't work for me is when capitalists make decisions in the way that Adam Smith suggested, which is that as long as you do everything in the interest of the investor, you're going to actually make the best decisions for all other stakeholders. I don't happen to agree with that.

we may consider the sabbath as an alternative to the endless demands of economic reality, more specifically the demands of market ideology that depend, as Adam Smith had already seen, on the generation of needs and desires that will leave us endlessly "rest-less," inadequate, unfulfilled, and in pursuit of that which may satiate desire.

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 interest. (Quoting Adam Smith)

A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: 'Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.'65 The result was what Adam Smith would call 'a strange absurdity' – a Company State.66

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith unveiled one of the most liberating of modern ideas—that the interests of the community could be advanced better by the self-interest than by the "benevolence" of the butcher, the baker and all the other upwardly clambering capitalists.

Economists have not always been so dense about self-control problems. For roughly two centuries, the economists who wrote on this topic knew their Humans. In fact, an early pioneer of what we would now call a behavioral treatment of self-control was none other than the high priest of free market economics: Adam Smith. When most people think about Adam Smith, they think of his most famous work, The Wealth of Nations

Growth theory did not begin with my articles of 1956 and 1957, and it certainly did not end there. Maybe it began with 'The Wealth of Nations'; and probably even Adam Smith had predecessors.

Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.

During the two centuries since the publication of 'The Wealth of Nations,' the main activity of economists, it seems to me, has been to fill the gaps in Adam Smith's system, to correct his errors and to make his analysis vastly more exact.

the liberal plan," as old Adam Smith wrote in 1776, "of [social] equality, [economic] liberty and [legal] justice," with a modest, restrained government giving real help to the poor.1 True modern liberalism.

Life is full of joys and sorrows, much of it our own making. Sadly, the West has voted time and time again for bigger government, more inflation, higher taxes and excessive regulation - all policies that have kept us from Adam Smith's vision of an opulent society.

The Americans, the Scottish economist Adam Smith warned, "feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel.… [They] are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves will become, and which indeed seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner. For people who want to operate on the B and I side, his book is a must-read, for it traces the greatest economists of all time, starting with Adam Smith who wrote The Wealth of Nations.

A nation is not made welthy by the childish accumulation of shiny metals, but it enriched by the economic prosperity of it's people.

I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.

Though those different plans were, perhaps, first introduced by the private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men, without any regard to, or foresight of, their consequences upon the general welfare of the society;

The most sacred laws of justice are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbor.

Where wages are not regulated by law, all that we can pretend to determine is, what are the most usual; and experience seems to shew that law can never regulate them properly, though it has often pretended to do so.

necessaries

Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.

Monopoly, besides, is a great enemy to good management, which can never be universally established, but in consequence of that free and universal competition which forces every body to have recourse to it for the sake of self defence.

it appears evidently from experience, that man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported.