Adam Smith
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Adam Smith’
Adam Smith encourages employers to restrict working hours to reasonable limits, for humanity and for profit.
Adam Smith urges employers not to tempt their employees to overwork. It leads to burn-out and a loss of productivity; and in the worst case scenario, the grasping employer must invest wholly avoidable time and money in training up a replacement.
A nation with its own laws and a strong sense of shared cultural identity makes good economic sense.
Adam Smith argues that preferring to live in a sovereign nation, with a strong sense of shared cultural identity and well-drafted, homemade laws, is not a matter of prejudice. It is a matter of sound economic reasoning, for every country of the world.
Adam Smith warns that politicians are the last people who should lecture the public about how to run their affairs.
Adam Smith, the pioneering Scottish economist, objected very strongly when politicians criticised the public for their spending habits. Private individuals alone actually create wealth, he said. By definition, Governments spend other people’s money and never make a penny in return.
Free trade brings to smaller nations all the advantages of empire without the disadvantages.
Adam Smith acknowledged that one advantage of empire was that goods and people could be readily moved internally, wherever they were needed. But he noted that you can get all that by each nation voluntarily adopting a policy of free trade.
If Britain is a chessboard, then politicians should remember that the ‘pieces’ are alive, and they generally play a better game.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith has been discussing how the character of individuals may affect the happiness of wider society. He sets up a contrast between ‘the man of humanity and benevolence’, who respects others and tries to improve society by persuasion, and ‘the man of system’, who reaches out to move people and peoples around as if they were just pawns on a chessboard.
No one is more dangerous than the man who thinks that it is his destiny to direct things for the common good.
The revolutionary Scottish philosopher Adam Smith did not like to hear politicians speaking of managing the national economy ‘for the common good’. Leaving ordinary people to manage their own affairs was, he said, far more beneficial to society at large, and much less of a temptation to susceptible politicians.