Yeah, I’ve not read Wealth of Nations, but I’ve heard that it doesn’t really support the libertarian/ultra-capitalist view of the economy who are the ones who like to quote it out of context the most… He was, after all, not an economist, but a moral philosopher.
Yeah, right wingers really just quote one sentence of Smith, and ignore everything else he says. Especially the following:
On the value of Labour:
Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.
On the origin of profit:
The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of the employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced.
On Government and policing:
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
and on whining about wage increases:
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
Excellent! Good on her and Corbyn.
I’m not sure she would ban suffragettes (unless some of them were trans of course).
Being consistent isn’t really part of what authoritarians do. As Monbiot makes clear in his comparison between the different behaviours towards climate protestors and wealthy landowners in expensive tractors.
I’m not as confident
Keir Starmer, future Labour leader and prime minister, was on a team representing one of the appellants.
