Sorry, but I just plain get the heebie jeebies on acoount of these damned pointy-headed economists and their God-damned "invisible hand."
I'll be damned if I want any bleeding "invisible hand" mucking about with my finances, money and welfare.
Now, it could be that this "invisible hand" business is just a bit of nonsense conjured up by some economists who are tripping in a drug-induced state, or are drunk out of their skulls, or have extremely vivid imaginations and they spend a lot of time imagining that an "invisible hand" is giving them an "invisible hand job."
I've been trying and trying and trying to understand their concept of the "invisible hand."
This business started in the year 1776 with the publication of a book by Scottish economist Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Mr. Smith drove generations of economists into utter hysterics with the following three sentences:
{B]y directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the great value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
Of course, when I see a statement like this I always interpret it in the simplest and most direct way and I don't have a problem with the concept. Having earned my keep by working, I look at my own case and it sure seems to me that if I look to my own self-interest and my own gain, if I expect to get the most possible value for my own industry, my own labors in terms of gilt and other forms of recompense, that by so doing I am doing a great benefit to society in general.
Meaning, I like to spend money and live well and if I got a bunch I'd spread it around and a lot of people would benefit. I most especially like to make enough money to keep a roof over my head, food on my table, and access to medical care and a modicum of frivolity and entertainment. Okay! I do like to spend a bundle of books and to keep authors and publishing houses in business.
But that doesn't seem to be the way that pointy-headed economists look at the issue. When I see industry, I see labor, the industry of one's hand, back, feet, the work of honest working people like me.
When these pointy-headed economists see the word, they seem to think in terms of the manufacture of goods in a factory or a branch of economic or commercial activity, leaving me and others like me out of the picture. That kind of hurts my feelings.
What about producing the greatest value for me resulting from my industry, looking to my own gain, taking care of my own self-interest?
But economists started babbling about markets and market efficiency and the free or unfettered market and it looks like in the 19th century there was a spirited debate about:
how the very visible hand of the government could bring about efficiency where the invisible hand failed to do so.
I stole that concept from The Hesitant Hand: Taming Self-Interest in the History of Economic Ideas by Steven G. Medema, 2009.
Having played around with the concept of industry of the "invisible hand" rendering an "invisible hand job," that title kind of makes me giggle.
I also think that economists like abstruse language in order to put simple working folk like me off their feed -- and feet, intellectually speaking.
I encountered the most wonderful sentence in Mr. Medema's book, just to show you:
While the focus of this book is almost exclusively on "microeconomic" analyses of market failure and governmental responses to it, these movements have their parallels on the macro side: Say's Law being of a piece with the affirmative view of the system of natural liberty during the classical era, the correspondence between Keynesian macro theory and Pigovian welfare economics regarding the broad scope for government intervention, and the rise of rational expectations theory and its policy invariance results at the same time that the work of the Chicago and Virginia schools was gaining converts to non-interventionism on the micro side.
Wow! What a mouthful!
But that still doesn't reconcile me to the present miserable situation of the working poor in the United States of America because of the "invisible hand" of the "free market" which essentially means the "invisible hand" that royally screws working people and their families.