[waffletower]

It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences. He shouldn't be personally faulted for it, he was just one man sharing his thinking a long time ago. Living people are to blame for not correcting for these shortcomings enough. I learned that it would have been best to have just said laissez-faire capitalism instead of invoking his name.

[JumpCrisscross]

> He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences

Smith wrote about the political economy. He absolutely considered the balance between public and market interests. Most people talking about The Wealth of Nations have never read it.

[TZubiri]

A hint is in the name, it's called the wealth of nations not the wealth of the sovereign individual.

[arduanika]

It doesn't matter whether you've misrepresented him? It doesn't matter whether the ideas you cite to him are ones that he actually held?

Are there any cases where truth matters to you? I hope that this is just a rare exception, but I struggle to see how it's a principled one in any way.

Anyhow, I guess I can't stop you. "Do what thou wilt", indeed.

[kasey_junk]

You’ll not find “the invisible hand” in wealth of nations as a major concept. It was a throw away phrase that wasn’t a central part of his writing.

[waffletower]

So many Smith apologists. I don't believe he should be demonized, and perhaps I am guilty of this by mentioning his name and 'satanic' in the same sentence, but he decidedly should not be lionized either. So many are drunk with history and shirk the work to evolve and transcend it. It doesn't matter if Adam Smith had morality and consideration, those are not ideals his writing ultimately bred, what matters are the free market ideals he clearly encouraged long ago, are now wildly out of control.

[antihipocrat]

He described a natural process, he didn't invent it.

The invisible hand in markets is a natural property with an effect that's dependent on the environment the market operates within. He may be the first person to describe the process in writing (that we know of), but human beings have been experiencing the effects of this since we first attempted to trade with one another.

[cortesoft]

He didn't encourage free market ideals, though! He warned us about them!

[dragonwriter]

He encouraged relatively free international trade rather than mercantilism, and and a lot of people have turned that into being an advocate for "capitalism" against a preceding system, never paying attention to the fact that mercantilism was an international trade policy response by nations with emergent capitalist economies trying to figure out how best to operate within that system, not an alternative (much less predecessor) economic system.

AFAICT this is (like a lot of the modern mythology of capitalism) started as a response (in the sense of an attempt to build a similar-but-opposed structure, not a response in conversation like a rebuttal) 19th Century anti-capitalist critics (and, in particular, Marx), part of which was setting Smith up as the preceding and opposing figure; a kind of capitalist Christ so that Marx could be the anti-Christ.

[peterashford]

Have you actually read The Wealth of Nations?

[dragonwriter]

> It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences.

The "invisible hand" was something of a minor metaphor that other people glommed on to later, and its clear that they, and not his actual work, are where your idea of Smith comes from if you can say "He didn't consider its shadow/consequences" with a straight face.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is almost entirely about the consequences of the (then-still-somewhat-emergent) capitalist economy system and its interactions with the political space. A very large part of it was warning about its dangers, and advising of how to manage and mitigate them.

[cortesoft]

> He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences

This is just completely false. Wealth of Nations spends a HUGE portion of the text to talk about the negative consequences of the 'invisible hand'. Why would you say he never considered its consequences? What about his famous quote from Wealth of Nations:

> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.