Don't blame Adam Smith

I was contemplating the phenomenon of zero hours contracts after my last post, and was considering the situation whereby half a million people in Britain are dependent on foodbanks in the fifth richest country in the world. Such a situation is the result of a dogmatic ideology, economic free market neoliberalism. It has been the guiding philosophy of all British parliamentarians since 1979 and is reducing Britain to a barbarian 19th century ruin. I was also considering how the fundamentals of this ideology are normally associated with the writings of Adam Smith. So, I returned to my copy of Smith's Wealth of Nations to try to some clues as to what Smith, the supposed champion of the free market, would think about zero hours contracts and foodbanks for working people? In his book, The Wealth of Nations Smith writes

Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

and

The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days, perhaps, in ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the utmost.

Wealth of Nations ch.V111 The Wages of Labour

I trust you will agree with me that Adam Smith does not appear to have much in common with our neoliberal coalition government, especially when he observes that

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.

And in a passage that sums our modern British approach to the poor and disadvantaged Smith writes in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that
 

This disposition to admire—and almost to worship—the rich and the powerful, and to despise or at least neglect persons of poor and mean condition, is (on one hand) necessary to establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, and (on the other) the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. Moralists all down the centuries have complained that wealth and greatness are often given the respect and admiration that only wisdom and virtue should receive, and that poverty and weakness are quite wrongly treated with the contempt that should be reserved for vice and folly.

 

What I am trying to point out here is that the supposed foundations of free market theory as practiced today are false. Our masters are operating by false theories and hypotheses, and like all false hypotheses must lead to false conclusions. That is fundamentally why our economy failed and has not effected any form of meaningful recovery and why our morality is so corrupt in that we blame all the ills in our society on the wrong people and approve the punishment of the poor, the disadvantaged and people on benefits.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat