Tag Archives

Archive of posts published in the tag: Adam Smith

Gray Swans

Small firewalls that contained corrections were being dismantled, leading to larger, far more damaging crashes.  Part of this was the result of greater connections from travel and communications, but a great part is the result of central powers believing they can control macro markets when they cannot. There is just too much dispersed and unarticulated knowledge for anyone or any administrative bureaucracy to accomplish this.

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The Twentieth Century Challenge to Enlightenment Individualism

Man’s collective identity was expressed politically in socialist ideologies and economically in corporate structures.  Technical advances empowered the collective, rendering the morality and individual prudence ill prepared to contain.

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Was Madison Wrong?

Madison was correct that a dispersal of special interests over a large land mass could protect a republic from tyranny, but he failed to foresee that special interests are no longer restrained by mere distance and geography. They now exist in the cloud.

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The Human Chessboard

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations with its often misunderstood ‘invisible hand’ was preceded by The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work many consider more important and should be considered an integral part of Wealth of Nations. This Quotation of the

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The Genius of Spontaneous Orders

Don Boudreaux in his excellent Cafe Hayek quotes from Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything.  I consider this the best new book of the year followed by Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic. Ridley compares the spontaneous order of evolution with

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When Ideas Start Having Sex

The internet gave rise to Google and Facebook. The iPhone gave rise to Uber. The ideologies are important only to the extent that they facilitated ideas. Our current development is less dependent on assets and physical capital than ideas. We

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Folly and Presumption

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council

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Capital Ideas

A sampling from  Explaining Conservative Economics in 25 Quotes by John Hawkins in Townhall 8/7/2012: “A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.” — F.A. Hayek “Either immediately or ultimately every

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Unexpected Genius

In 1879 as Karl Marx was becoming popular in Europe Alfred Marshall wrote The Economics of Industry.   Marx was a reaction to the principles of Adam Smith.  Karl Marx focused on the distribution of an existing pie where Adam Smith

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Political Greed and Crony Capitalism

Ever since Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street declared “Greed is Good” capitalism has been cast in a sinister role that it has yet to overcome. The movie speech was rumored to be taken from a

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