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Michael Perkins's Reviews > An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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How the message of this book was falsified by removing an important chapter.
The entire edifice of modern mainstream economic theory has effaced the emphasis that enlightenment thinkers placed on economic fairness and accountability for corporate crime, thus legitimizing unfair, exploitative and often violent practices. A keystone is Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This study has been used to support some of economics’ most comforting narratives, including the ideas of shared prosperity through enlightened self-interest and avoidance of corruption through minimizing government regulation. But this is a willful misreading of Smith enabled by a concerted exclusion of central aspects of his thought.
Many modern editions omit the entirety of Book V, Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth, in which Smith writes at length about the necessity of government intervention, and includes an account of the East India Company’s heinous abuses of monopoly privilege, including torture and coercion of Indians and the ransacking and looting of villages and palaces.
The result of the omission of Smith's chapter means that present economic theory, from undergraduate textbooks to received wisdom, is built on a lie. Corporations benefit from historically inaccurate theories about the ability of government regulation to improve public welfare, leading to an erosion of checks and balances and a reduction in corporate responsibility. The idea that a free market benefits everyone is, then, founded on a received theory that never existed, and the editing of Wealth of Nations is one of the most brazen knowledge heists in modern scholarship.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/fi...
The entire edifice of modern mainstream economic theory has effaced the emphasis that enlightenment thinkers placed on economic fairness and accountability for corporate crime, thus legitimizing unfair, exploitative and often violent practices. A keystone is Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This study has been used to support some of economics’ most comforting narratives, including the ideas of shared prosperity through enlightened self-interest and avoidance of corruption through minimizing government regulation. But this is a willful misreading of Smith enabled by a concerted exclusion of central aspects of his thought.
Many modern editions omit the entirety of Book V, Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth, in which Smith writes at length about the necessity of government intervention, and includes an account of the East India Company’s heinous abuses of monopoly privilege, including torture and coercion of Indians and the ransacking and looting of villages and palaces.
The result of the omission of Smith's chapter means that present economic theory, from undergraduate textbooks to received wisdom, is built on a lie. Corporations benefit from historically inaccurate theories about the ability of government regulation to improve public welfare, leading to an erosion of checks and balances and a reduction in corporate responsibility. The idea that a free market benefits everyone is, then, founded on a received theory that never existed, and the editing of Wealth of Nations is one of the most brazen knowledge heists in modern scholarship.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/fi...
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July 17, 2020
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BlackOxford
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Feb 03, 2021 11:32PM
Excellent.
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I had not heard of this, but it's completely in keeping with the rest of the enterprise.I suppose there must already be conservative-approved editions of the New Testament where the bits about rich people not getting into heaven have been deleted?
I can attest that those passages in the NT have been summarily ignored for centuries. The Epistle of St. James, which is strong on this point, was cast aside by a hot-headed, misguided Martin Luther. And thus the notion, since that time, is that all it takes is faith to be saved, no matter what your actions. And if you offend, you simply ask forgiveness, no harm, no foul. What the theologian/pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer criticized as "cheap grace."
