kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: The billionaires of our time clearly grew up on some “dog eat dog” social & ...

The billionaires of our time clearly grew up on some “dog eat dog” social & economic pseudo-science but it would be sufficient if they read… Adam Smith, the very same who is today rather ignorantly praised as father of “totally unrestricted market”. Smith, writing in the 18th century, had some very explicit warnings to them:

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. (“Inquiry…”, Chapter VIII)

There’s many thoughts in Smith’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776) and “Theory of Moral Sentiments” (TMS, 1777), similar in this spirit, which perfectly explain what we’re now seeing in Europe and USA. As crazy as it may sounds to today’s libertarians, both Smith’s books are largely founded on the idea that it’s… morality and justice that are foundations of any society and economy, not the other way around.

Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it. (…) Justice, on the contrary, is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society … must in a moment crumble into atoms (“Theory…”, Chapter III)

In the “Inquiry…” Smith postulated, no more, o less, but public education for the poor, public works and infrastructure for both public benefit and employment, certain forms of taxation that fall more heavily on luxury consumption or rents, regulation where markets alone produced harmful outcomes (so much of your “totally free market”, libertarians) and criticism of some English-specific laws that trapped poor workers in particular regions.

Smith clearly opposed violence (which Marx and Engels made central part of their dystopia as a “purging force”), but warned that violence is the undesired yet unavoidable outcome of prolonged injustice. Re-reading parts of Smith today, and it’s not easy due to his archaic language, I would say he was pretty supporter of social-democratic organisation of society with free market as the primary economic instrument, whose actual freedom (from monopolies and rentiers) is ensured by regulation. It’s very sad today Smith was reduced to “abandon all regulation” by people who clearly had never read him…