I do not think it means what you think it means...

Was Adam Smith really a promoter of greed?




An excellent book chapter giving a more complete picture of Adam Smith's economic and moral philosophy that is not as conservatives would have you believe. Greed is not good. Laissez-Faire is not absolute.

"In reality, as Adam Smith argued, one of the main functions of government, beyond that of securing the order that allows markets to operate effectively, is that of intervening to ensure that the unwarranted excesses of commercial society do not entirely destroy the social order or the moral foundations of behaviour. As we have seen in his arguments regarding the role of publicly funded education in redressing the worst of the degrading and demoralising effects of the division of labour and reducing the possibility of revolutionary protests against an unjust social order, Smith argued that in effect ‘…the visible hand of the state would counteract the potentially stultifying effects of the invisible hand of the market’ "

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