What’s more, he uses this utopian image to make a larger point: that even if all businesses operated like the great commercial companies, with an eye only to self-interest, it wouldn’t matter. Even the “natural selfishness and rapacity” of the rich, with all their “vain and insatiable desires” will still, through the logic of the invisible hand, lead to the benefit of all.70 In other words, Smith simply imagined away the role of consumer credit in his own day, just as he had his account of the origins of money.71
