The Liberty Fund, for instance, has produced a whole book of fragmented quotes of this nature. Sure enough, it is possible to cherry-pick its contents to cite various passages in isolation and out of context to make it appear that way. The Wealth of Nations has latterly been portrayed almost exclusively as a bible for anyone who wants to position themselves as an enemy of government. This is a very important distinction both when thinking through the historical origins of competitiveness discourse and when fast-forwarding two-and-a-half centuries to the way in which the political agenda appears to have become transfixed by the underlying desire to always be seen promoting competition.” “What tends to be depicted today as a totalising attack on all political interventions into the economic realm was actually a specific attack on the capture of political activity by certain economic actors. The modern-day notion residing within competitiveness discourse that a corporation has a right to extract profit any way it likes therefore cannot be constructed out of Smith’s texts. The notion that a corporation might have a duty to extract profit from the economy is therefore completely meaningless in this strictly interpersonal setting. Duties for him are something that one person owes to another and, within a societal context, something that everyone owes to everyone else. The modern-day view that the only responsibility of business is to make money is anathema to Smith’s moral theory. Smith reserved his most biting criticism of individual action for instances in which that structure is not respected. The whole of his economics is based on a moral theory which suggests that people flourish only in the context of widespread deference to a structure of duties. This is because in his framework corporations, like all actors either individual or collective, have a responsibility to those around them. Smith simply did not believe that corporations should be left to their own devices: there is no underlying message anywhere in The Wealth of Nations about ‘letting business be business’. Yet nowhere is it evident in his own published work. Such a view is today regularly attributed to Smith, following a strategic reading-in of modern-day competitiveness concerns to his concept of the ‘invisible hand’. This brings to light some important differences, none more so than in relation to the idea that companies should just be left to do as they please because they are, after all, the geese that lay the golden eggs of economic growth. It is always more interesting to see what Smith actually said for himself rather than allowing to go unchallenged the words that were put into his mouth nearly 200 years after his death. It is also familiar as an early pre-emption of the competitiveness discourse that casts such a shadow over political debate today.īut now try to park in one corner of your mind this popular image of Adam Smith. It is familiar as a rule-of-thumb history linking the political upheavals of the 1980s to their supposed intellectual underpinnings. Cut unhelpful red tape, end restrictive practices that cost companies money, and unleash the wealth creators to bring all sorts of goodies to the otherwise overly burdened national economy. Clear the decks of self-defeating corporate regulations, they said, and follow instead the teachings of the eighteenth-century master who argued that the profit motive stood alone as the only credible piece of the regulatory jigsaw. In both instances the appeal to Smith as an authority figure was intended to lend some gravitas to the often-repeated cliché of ‘letting business be business’. Yet nowhere is it evident in his own published work.” “The idea that companies should just be left to do as they please because they are, after all, the geese that lay the golden eggs of economic growth.
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