December 05, 2001
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Success has many fathers
Whenever something goes well in a business, more people will claim responsibility for it. This is what appears to be happening with Adam Smith's legacy. Now that it is apparent that he was on to something with the "Invisible Hand", the more socialistically-inclined are searching his intentions for signs that he is one of them (via Reductio ad Absurdum).
This is, of course, easy, since the evidence of the well-known desire of all free marketers to put babies on spikes and strip the flesh off the poor are..somehow absent from his writing, now that they look at it. Read carefully. It is his stated "intentions" that redeem him in their eyes, not his ideas or recommendations. He is actually in favor (gasp!) of improving the general welfare. Here's everyone's favorite pinata, Noam Chomsky:
Chomsky, who has long criticized capitalism, sharply distinguishes between Smith and his conservative followers, writing that: "It's quite remarkable to trace the evolution of values from a pre-capitalist thinker like Adam Smith, with his stress on sympathy and the goal of perfect equality and the basic human right to creative work, to contrast that and move on to the present to those who laud the new spirit of the age, sometimes rather shamelessly invoking Adam Smith's name."
Here's David McNally (and Emma Rothschild):
According to both Rothschild and McNally, Hayek was guilty of conflating Smith's moral defence of the market with the amoral celebration of self-interest found in other economic theories. Hayek, who was a product of Freud's Vienna, defended capitalism because it encompassed human irrationality. As an enlightenment thinker, Smith would have found such an argument alien to his sensibility. "Smith definitely does not have the sort of Hayekian contempt for human reason," says McNally.
Sigh. Some people not only hear whatever they want to hear, they read it. How can it be news to them that BOTH Smith and Hayek argued for free markets as the best route to greater welfare? And since when does Hayek have "contempt for human reason." That's like calling Ayn Rand a collectivist.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at December 5, 2001 01:16 PM | Technorati inbound links