Well, why do you buy into the economy being a morality play?
Which is different from your approach, how? Theirs is Protestant and yours is Catholic?
It's just their tired old economic morality play teaching that poverty is a virtue and owning property and using it to make a profit are sins.
Oh, for the love of god! Do none of you people have any bloody clue at all what Smith's "invisible hand" was a metaphor for? Where on earth did you get the notion that it had anything to do with the economy delivering just rewards to those who deserve them? If you intend to critique somebody's ideas, don't you think you should first put three seconds of effort into finding out what they are?
Adam Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher. His Theory of Moral Sentiments underscores his views about acceptable behavior. Smith distrusted business men and disliked landlords. In fact, one of the themes of his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is that landlords were essentially economic parasites who detracted from economic production. Anyone who has actually read Smith's treatises with the least bit of comprehension would know that there is an implicit moral philosophy behind the "invisible hand" in his eyes.
Indeed so. But no one who has actually read Smith's treatises with the least bit of comprehension would think his implicit moral philosophy is the childish Protestant-work-ethic/virtue-of-thrift/if-you're-righteous-you'll-prosper worldview, which Pilkington was criticizing and which the earlier posters imagined is what the "Invisible Hand" was a metaphor for.
No they aren't. They're about people being presumed to be misusing their social position as power over others to enrich themselves at the expense of others, purely based on their being rich. This is a recurrent theme in much of what ksen posts. He wears his prejudice against the rich, and the zero-sum thinking that probably causes his prejudice, on his sleeve.
Anyone familiar with Smith's notions of enlightened self-interest and the rest of his moral philosophy would clearly understand that his view of the function of the invisible hand is one of an expansive version "just" deserts. Which would then allow them to wonder what whose minds in this thread you mistakenly believe you can read and if there is an actual point to your responses.
That's pretty sweet, coming from a guy who thinks I'm a lawyer and a guy who decided I'm British because I was able to phrase an argument in pounds instead of dollars. (I can think in meters and kilograms too -- it's one of my superpowers.)
Sorry, I worded that badly -- no doubt you think poor people are often as wicked as rich people. But that doesn't mean you aren't still acting out the Catholic morality play; it just means you've incorporated some much-needed cynicism into it. Catholicism traditionally deems wealth a sin and suffering a virtue; it honors poverty's innocence of wealth accumulation and the suffering it endures. The "Leftish" morality play secularized these religious beliefs into hostility toward the rich and the notion that people deserve pay according to how hard they work, which is a view you've certainly expressed. As for the sinfulness of wealth, you make bigoted wholesale accusations against "the 1%" on a regular basis, and you advocated making it illegal to own more than a certain amount. Are you going to tell me you want to outlaw something that you don't disapprove of?
You called self-interest the basest aspect of human nature, you defended Marx and Lenin, and you repeatedly claimed labor is the source of all value; but you're okay with making a profit using your property? You don't disapprove of bankers lending money at interest and landlords collecting rent from tenant farmers? Weird. Sorry to misunderstand, then, but you gave me good cause.
Yeah, maybe in the sense of the original 1933 "Humanist Manifesto". You want to be humanistic, quit treating your outgroup as subhuman.
Maybe in the sense of "expansive" where growing weed in your backyard and smoking it in your house satisfies an "expansive" definition of interstate commerce. The "invisible hand" is a metaphor for positive externalities -- for the fact that you often benefit others as a side-effect even when you're only trying to benefit yourself, just as in the example funinspace gave in post #39 -- and that society as a whole benefits from all these positive externalities. The implicit moral philosophy Smith is appealing to with it is transparently utilitarian. Reading it as meaning a market economy gives us what we deserve is doing violence to the text.
That completely ignores the context of "enlightened self-interest" in Smith's thought. And the invisible hand cannot possibly be a metaphor for positive externalities (at least in the modern sense of the world) because the effects work through the market place.
