[lcargill99]

I really think you are mixing up your units, so to speak. Smith spoke of men wanting to be loved and to be lovely. The reducibility of society to the individual is a feature of liberalism - indeed, it's probably the defining characteristic. Once we try to make a collective a unit of polity, we run into trouble.

Smith's math was - for every dollar in profit "p" you make, you create "x" dollars of consumer surplus, and "x" is always much more than "p" ( because people simply would not bother. The "unconscious" nature of consumer surplus, and the clear historical disasters wrought by large efforts based on intentions show clearly that we need discipline in our evaluation of what we do that does good. One was of doing that is price and profit.

There are the Adam Curtis films, in which he tries to use neocon logic to critique liberalism without being the sort of neocon one can spit on, but his films are problemsome. He at least asks the right questions, which are hard questions, and you can't blame him for being responsible enough to provide at least one answer.

Profit is little more than a "qsort callback" related to priority. it is a tool for the always difficult question of "what shall we do now?" There are certainly forms of gain which entail rent-seeking or despoilment which are called profit ( but are not, really - there are either economic rents or involve the creation of negative externalities ) but beyond that, Smith's read really is that of a moral philosopher first, and I've yet to see a really good counter to it that does not involve something akin to universe-building.