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by canyp 29 days ago
I don't dispute OP, but Adam Smith's premise was that the free market and "invisible hand" were meant to benefit society as a whole, and the minimal government intervention was there to enforce that. Therefore one could argue that the kind of capitalism we have today is not Smiths's original vision, but rather, a failure to implement that vision.

To be clear, I am not defending the position, and maybe that vision just cannot be implemented in practice, or the premise is wrong, etc. Just trying to answer the question as to why OP might be downvoted. We cannot generally conflate defenders of free-market capitalism with defenders of the existing capitalism. I've heard such arguments before, maybe somebody can elaborate in more detail.