This will be a series of canards to kill. I'm asking for your help - - ammo to use in my never ending war to shut wingers up and down.
I've done this many times in the past with facts. For example, any wingle-nut that cries "liberal media, liberal media" gets a counter of "prove your assertion, Bush had gay concubine media handler...."
The response is usually resounding silence....more below the fold!
Let's start with "Adam Smith made me do it." A lot of my heroes are old dead white guys like Mr. Smith. I can't let wingers use one of my favorite economic philosopher's good name to justify the ends!
Any time you hear someone defending crony capitalism with Adam Smith, please disabuse them of this notion. Free trade was a Smithian ideal, but organizations like the WTO run under the guise of free trade, when actually it's more "free trade" that will benefit some capitalists.
Bush appointees to the WTO include the CEO of Weyerhauser, the vice chair of Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Red Lobster), the president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, and the CEO of Victoria 's Secret.
No surprises there, business as usual.
Back to Adam Smith and Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which "he builds up the whole moral nature of man out of a single primitive emotion -- sympathy, and in which he gives a history of ethical philosophy besides."
Sympathy. Whoa. Not exactly the hallmark of American capitalism, eh?
Upon Smith's death, his executors advised, that, all along, Smith had worked on a plan to give "a connected history of the liberal and elegant arts."
Cough cough....Pure capitalism and the "liberal" arts aren't exactly synonymous, if you know what I mean...
On the Wealth of Nations-
"... it is not his aim to espouse the interests of any class. He is concerned with promoting the wealth of the entire nation. And wealth, to Adam Smith, consists of the goods which all the people of society consume; note all - this is a democratic, and hence radical, philosophy of wealth. Gone is the notion of gold, treasures, kingly hoards; gone the prerogatives of merchants or farmers or working guilds..."
--Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers, p. 45.
Wow! Sounds like the more of a socialist or communist view to me rather than capitalism.
So next time you hear crony capitalism linked to "our" very liberal Adam Smith, you can say...
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"Adam Smith didn't make you do it, greed did."
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Philosophy/Smith.htm#TOC
Next week I'll be looking at patriotism and prayer, focusing on the "original" and "modern" versions of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Maybe you can suggest more ways in which I can dissemble and disabuse our fugly freepin friends.