DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

David Director Friedman is always worth reading.

Our lead authors’ repeated references to “the poor,” in an essay written by and for moderns, badly misrepresents the 18th century world and Smith’s view of it. When Smith was writing, the working class, the people Smith is referring to in that quote, represented not the lower end of the income distribution but the bulk of the population.

Modern day liberals have the same problem. From making the poor work for their benefits to what to do with illegitimate babies, they seem to think this is Britain of 150 years ago; Hillary Clinton, for example, apparently read Dickens at Wellesley and her brain got stuck there.

One can get a clearer idea of Smith’s view of issues of equality from his long discussion of alternative forms of taxation. He begins with a set of maxims, of which the first is:

I. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards 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.

While he rejected taxes directly on income (except, possibly, the income of government employees), he thought that the overall incidence of taxation ought to be in proportion to income.

I guess Dennis would say that Adam Smith isn’t a ‘reasonable person’, either.

 The version of libertarianism that seems most plausible to me is one where respecting rights is seen as a good thing, a value in itself as well as a means to other values, but not as a value that trumps all others. One reason to respect natural rights is that it is a good thing to do, another is that respecting them can be expected to produce a healthier, wealthier, and happier world than violating them.

That’s what I mean by ‘reasonable person’. And it ain’t Barack Obama.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2012 at 10:31 and is filed under Think about it.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.