The Real Adam Smith
This article is mostly accurate about Smith (although the man himself was much more favorable to entrepreneurs and innovators than is presented), but fairly inaccurate that “Right-wing” politics is some perversion of Smith. At the end, we get a taste of what he means in that Thatcher privatized various state industries during her run as Prime Minister in the &#x27;80s.<p>Otherwise, an entire sub-field of economics (it would be a sub-field of &quot;political economy&quot; if that term were widespread today) is Public Choice, which demonstrates rather well that often state intervention is at the behest of the &quot;merchant interests.&quot; Public Choice is a direct descendent of Adam Smith’s thinking. Indeed, the very term &quot;state capture&quot; that the author invokes frequently probably derived from &quot;regulatory capture,&quot; a term Public Choice helped propagate.<p>There is also a misunderstanding that Smith’s &quot;invisible hand&quot; concept implies some sort of Utopian paradise, when in fact, Smith meant more that aspiring monopolists who are nonetheless in competition with each other (and often in cooperation with others) lead to an increase in social gains, which on its own seems paradoxical and is highly counterintuitive. Modern economics seems founded on maximizing or minimizing every possible variable of interest, so I suppose some people may actually argue that the invisible hand is a statement about maximization, which it definitely isn’t. In practice, the only people I see invoke the &quot;Invisible Hand&quot; in this manner are harsh critics of any sort of free enterprise regardless of the context, and always advocates of state intervention and thus regulatory capture (&quot;[people] of the system&quot;, indeed).<p>I am most surprised that Smith&#x27;s sympathies for labor do not appear in this essay, as they seem to be quite strong. Smith discusses the effects of specialization that happens during industrialization, and goes so far as to say it makes workers with repetitive tasks &quot;stupid.&quot; In context, his sympathies are clearly with the worker.<p>I guess as someone with relatively Smithian-Hayekian views, I am missing the overall point of this article, other than to hand-wring that so-called Neoliberalism (I have never met a Neoliberal) is actually unrelated to Smith’s ideas and are a perversion. He is entirely unconvincing, even if one accepts for the sake of argument that &quot;neoliberalism&quot; exists as a coherent philosophy or even ideology (it doesn&#x27;t).