Definition of political terms (Part 2 Adam Smith)

Marx is the heart of what has become the left wing movement of the day.

The Right owes it's beginnings to a man named Adam Smith.

Smiths ideas were fundamentally economic, he produced an early, economics textbook of sorts but because of the way it was written it has been seized on by many people.

Adam Smiths idea was that instead of relying on peoples good will for society to run, people were fundamentally selfish (although apparently not that selfish). Perhaps a better word to use is self- centered!

So the idea is that if someone thinks 'Oh I want to make some money, what can I do?' This person may decide to bake loaves of bread. That might be the thing he is good at or reasonably enjoys, so one of his most famous lines in the beginning of his books, 'the wealth of nations' is that it is not from their charity that the baker bakes bread but self interest.

This, in my view, was fundamentally because Adam Smiths own self interest was not aggressive enough for him to be negative to anyone else in any way!

Reading through his books the wealth of nations, which I have only read a few hundred pages of; you can't help coming to the conclusion that you're not reading an economic textbook but a tribute to common sense. Common sense does NOT include attaching to ideas like a religion.

For instance, Adam Smith is associated with de- regulation. Fairly early on in the book however, he writes that banks should be regulated against serving their customers in too smaller change, since they were doing this for some slightly fraudulent reason. Hardly the person who's theories can justifiably be used to de- regulate the entire multi trillion dollar Western banking system!

With de- regulation Smiths ideas followed the basic law of supply and demand in nature. He did not trust governments to control markets ethically and without the endless incompetance of governments he outlines in his books. So his idea is simple (although this was not taken directly from his book):

If there are more workers than jobs, the wages will be lowered, the workers will move away decreasing the supply of work.
If there are more jobs than workers, the employer will offer good wages to attract workers from competing jobs, Eventually more workers will arrive.

Rather like how it works with animals, seeking new hunting ground, and predators dying off when there is not enough prey etc. Then there being a surplus of prey because of less predators.

This becomes rolled out to all areas of society, and there was an idea that when society is not interfered with by government, an invisible hand steps in and moderates everything very well.