Later, I appreciated your definition better when exposed to the writings of Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist who is something like the patron saint of free-marketeers. Yes, factory owners driving fourteen-year-old workers into an early grave were brutish. But Smith argued that the needs of society – more and cheaper clothes, shelter, food; the stuff of prosperity – could not be met with moralisers or do-gooders. Only the capitalists’ passion for profit could provide these. Why? Because to profit, it was not enough to squeeze the living daylights out of their workers. After
...more
