tell you about businessmen being anathema to government!"
The text below is quoted from this article in Common Dreams:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/23/4046/"· “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
· “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Second, he believed that workers deserve a living wage:
· “It is but equity … that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerable well fed, clothed and lodged.”
Third - and here’s a real shocker - he believed that the wealthy should pay more in taxes:
“The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”
Fourth, he believed in the necessity of public investments in infrastructure and public goods. He spoke of the duty of government to support “public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain.”
If he were alive today, he would probably consider education and health care as examples of this kind of public goods.
Smith and his Scottish Enlightenment allies were not ideologues and were better psychologists than those today who view humans as organic calculating machines. They were pretty, well, enlightened. They recognized that a good society and a healthy capitalist economy depended on a shared prosperity.
As his dear friend the philosopher David Hume put it in 1752, “Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor.”
Since Reagan and Thatcher, every successive UK and US Government has actually made a point of rejecting each one of these insights, in favour of their antitheses. And they have the blasted gall to claim Adam Smith as their guru. How well our countries would have prospered had they respected his teachings, instead of despising them as doctrinaire "leftie" twaddle.
On the other hand, South America would probably still be in the thrall of fascist dicators, so I suppose great benefits to its peoples has ensued from our own countries' rapine at the hands of our shadowy puppet-masters, and consequent looming national indigence. By giving the "green light" to cartels and the mighty, our crypto-fascist leaders have precisely destroyed any semblance of the free market those right-wing loons go on about.
"And He said to them, "Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: 'THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY ..."