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Adam smith

by justin hill

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  • Adam Smith was born in a small village in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, where his widowed mother raised him. At age fourteen, as was the usual practice, he entered the University of Glasgow on scholarship. He later attended Balliol College at Oxford, graduating with an extensive knowledge of European literature and an enduring contempt for English schools.

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  • Scottish social philosopher and political economist Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and achieved the first comprehensive system of political economy.

LAIZZEZ-Faire

  • The New “Science of Man” or the social sciences: Economics: Adam Smith (1723–1790) Wealth came from the productivity of human labor. The “invisible hand” of the marketplace (rational humans who could best decide for themselves) Made the best statement of laizzez-faire economics Laissez-faire—wealth and goods to circulate without government interference

Smith showed that this vast ‘mercantilist’ edifice was folly. He argued that in a free exchange, both sides became better off. Quite simply, nobody would trade if they expected to lose from it. The buyer profits, just as the seller does. Imports are just as valuable to us as our exports are to others.



Because trade benefits both sides, said Smith, it increases our prosperity just as surely as do agriculture or manufacture. A nation’s wealth is not the quantity of gold and silver in its vaults, but the total of its production and commerce – what today we would call gross national product.

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Adam Smith has sometimes been caricatured as someone who saw no role for government in economic life. In fact, he believed that government had an important role to play. Like most modern believers in free markets, Smith believed that the government should enforce contracts and grant patents and copyrights to encourage inventions and new ideas. He also thought that the government should provide public works, such as roads and bridges, that, he assumed, would not be worthwhile for individuals to provide. Interestingly, though, he wanted the users of such public works to pay in proportion to their use.

Someone earning money by his own labor benefits himself. Unknowingly, he also benefits society, because to earn income on his labor in a competitive market, he must produce something others value. In Adam Smith’s lasting imagery, “By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

Some people wonder how the self-interest that drives Smith’s economic system can be squared with the ‘sympathy’ that drive his ethics. Here is his answer:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except

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  • In 1759 Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book whose main contention is that human morality depends on sympathy between the individual and other members of society. On the heels of the book, he became the tutor of the future Duke of Buccleuch (1763–1766) and traveled with him to France, where Smith met with other eminent thinkers of his day, such as Benjamin Franklin and French economist Turgot.

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the pleasure of seeing it.
In other words, human nature is complex. We are self-interested, but we also like to help others too. Smith’s books are complementary: they show how self-interested human beings can live together peacefully (in the moral sphere) and productively (in the economic).
The Wealth Of Nations is no endorsement of economic greed, as sometimes caricatured. Self-interest may drive the economy, but that is a force for good – provided there is genuinely open competition and no coercion. And it is the most

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