Quotes About Adam Smith

It was a revolution against owner-caste oligarchy and cheating! Adam Smith recommended the remedy of democracy, plus openly negotiated and deliberated laws that are evenly enforced by transparently accountable civil servants. And our markets got better – more creative and productive – each time those rules were adjusted to expand our circles of democratic inclusion.

In Europe, however, the standard of living has not been reversed, except temporarily in time of war, since the late 1600s. No one knows the causes for this, although much analysis has been made, the best known being that of Adam Smith who argued, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), that societies can promote economic growth by establishing peace, low taxes, and impartially implemented laws to protect property and investments.3

In my book, 'The Big Three in Economics,' I found that the press has frequently and prematurely written the obituary of Adam Smith and his free-market philosophy, only to see a new and more vibrant global marketplace reemerge after being savagely attacked by Keynesians, Marxists, and assorted socialists.

But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life.

Like the Founders, the Conservative also recognizes in society a harmony of interests, as Adam Smith put it, and rules of cooperation that have developed through generations of human experience and collective reasoning that promote the betterment of the individual and society. This is characterized as ordered liberty, the social contract, or the civil society.

The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Unlike Adam Smith's invisible hand of the free market, Wilson's dark hand represented the dangers of an unregulated economy: downward mobility and the ruin of countless lives.26