The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

by Naomi Oreskes

Yet Smith absolutely affirms that workers are entitled to a minimum standard of decency: “No society can surely be flourishing or happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath 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, cloathed and lodged.”63 If one were not persuaded by arguments of equity, Smith offers the practical argument that well-fed workers are better workers.64 “That men in general should work better when they are ill fed than when they are well fed, when they are disheartened than when they are in good spirits, when they are frequently sick than when they are generally in good health, seems not very probable.”65 Thus he concludes that when a “regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable, but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.”