The 250th Anniversary of Adam Smith's Revolutionary Text - Robert Reich

[justaprogressive]

Not only did America declare its independence from Britain 250 years ago, but the man presumed to be the father of conservative economics published his opus, The Wealth of Nations, 250 years ago this month.

It, too, was revolutionary.

snip

It’s no accident that An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (a title usually shortened to The Wealth of Nations) appeared the same year that Americans declared themselves free and independent citizens, with a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, as this age is now called, assumed that individuals would naturally and inevitably strive to make better lives for themselves, to maximize their own satisfaction and happiness.

This didn’t mean that people were selfish or that they had no use for patriotism or religion. It meant simply that their basic motive was to improve their lot in life. It followed that a good society was one which allowed its citizens to do so.

Adam Smith’s ideas fit perfectly with this new democratic idea. To him, the “wealth” of a nation wasn’t determined by the size of its monarch’s treasure or the amount of gold and silver in its vaults, nor by the spiritual worthiness of its people in the eyes of the Church.

A nation’s wealth was to be judged by the total value of all the goods its people produced for all its people to consume. To a reader in the. twenty-first century, this assertion may seem obvious. At the time he argued it, it was a revolutionary democratic vision.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-250th-anniversary-of-adam-smiths

[Mme. Defarge]

1. When I was a college student I ended up not getting an A

on an economics test because I spent the night before reading The Wealth of Nations instead of studying for the exam. Couldn’t put it down and have no regrets.