Whatever Happened to Adam Smith?
23rd August 2016
“Laissez faire, laissez passer” is the most tolerant of all creeds. As Smith insisted, it’s the very opposite of “pro-business” or pro-inequality; the market loves to disrupt complacent cartels. Yet to listen to most of the intelligentsia, you would think that freedom to exchange goods and services – which they prefer to call by the Marxist word “capitalism” – has done terrible harm in the world and needs taming by virtuous government. Further, that small-government philosophy has been terminally discredited, not least by the financial crisis of 2008.
There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’, except in the minds of Marxists and their dupes (which is almost everybody these days).
There are free markets, and there are unfree markets; that’s all.