Hi Robert
Indeed so, alas. The winds of free trade favour the ships with the
biggest sails.
But you malign the much misquoted Adam Smith. He's supposed to be the
darling of the neo-liberals and the corporate world, but he'd have
hated them. It's not just the term economic freedom that got
heisted, they heisted him too.
Have a look at this:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg34207.html
Re: [biofuel] The Wealth of Nature
5 May 2004
Going back two centuries, economists have worried about what Adam
Smith described as the tendency of chieftains in a market system ''to
deceive and even to oppress the public.
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 (The Wealth of
Nations). He said businessmen always yearn to escape from price
competition through collusion.
He didn't like corporations, nor governments. He viewed government
primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites
and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. Civil
government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property,
is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the
poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none
at all.'
Adam Smith commented in 1776 that the only trades that justified
incorporation were banking, insurance, canal building and waterworks.
He believed it was contrary to the public interest for any other
businesses or trades to be incorporated and that all should be run as
partnerships.
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.
(The Wealth of Nations)
Whenever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one
very rich man, there must be at least five hundred of the poor, and
the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many... (The
Wealth of Nations)
Guess: how many times does Adam Smith mention the invisible hand in
The Wealth of Nations?
Once. And he doesn't think much of it.
Anyway, we're not short of someone to blame just because Adam Smith
turns out to be a good guy. Try this:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg70989.html
[Biofuel] Specters of Malthus: Scarcity, Poverty, Apocalypse
Sat, 15 Sep 2007
There simply HAS to be a more equitable way to run business than the
global corporate personhood model.
Schumacher, Gandhi...
Why do so many average people in
my country find this kind of drivel compellling?
Because of Edward Bernays, largely, IMHO. A menage a trois made in
heaven: Malthus, Bernays and the Heritage Foundation. Aarghh!!!
doesn't it? For the minority who wield (weild? Sometimes I HATE this
language!) ...
:-) What's the problem Robert? Just follow the rules: i before e
excepting after c. Simple. So please rein in all this unseemly
language-hatred. It's weird that you can't spell wield.
Um, not sure there's such a word as heisted, sorry about that.
All best
Keith/Kieth
Keith Addison wrote:
Every year, the Heritage Foundation, in conjunction with the Wall
Street Journal, dutifully churns out its annual Index of Economic
Freedom, a ratings guide to countries' relative corporate
hospitality.
Anything that comes out of the Heritage Foundation makes good
fireplace fodder . . .
For the last several years, the report has been subtitled The Link
Between Economic Opportunity and Prosperity, and a central thesis
of the report is that removing controls on corporations will create
economic wealth.
Sigh . . . Adam Smith all over again . . .
When apples are compared to apples -- that is, when
countries of similar economic development are compared -- this claim
is revealed to be nonsensical, as various studies from the Center
for Economic and Policy Research and many others have shown.
But more important than the asserted connection between removing
corporate restraints and prosperity is the report's definitional
maneuver. It claims economic freedom -- and all of the justifiably
positive connotations with freedom -- as part of the corporate
agenda. It equates economic freedom with corporate superiority to
popular control.
I guess that all depends on WHOSE economic freedom we're counting,
doesn't it? For the minority who wield (weild? Sometimes I HATE this
language!) power and wish to exert control, for those who wish to expand
into new markets for the sake of gaining even greater wealth, then
yes, it's freedom. I liken this type of freedom to the freedom of
slave owners, who were free to own slaves. The slaves, of course,
didn't see things that way.
The Index of Economic Freedom is not the only tool to spread this
propaganda, but it is among the most influential. The idea has
seeped deep into the culture.
It's become a kind of orthodoxy
