On the Wealth of Nations Read Online Free PDF Page A

with some general misunderstandings about cash, capital flow, and government finances. Mercantilists held thatthe way to make a nation rich was to increase its exports and limit its imports. To give Smith's case against mercantilism in extreme concision: imports are Christmas morning; exports are January's MasterCard bill.
    In
The Wealth of Nations
the accused were all the world's potentates, politicians, and wealthy merchants. But these were also the veniremen, judges, and officers of the court. Surprisingly, acquittal of the mercantilists wasn't immediate. William Pitt the Younger, prime minister during Smith's last years, accepted the evidence and instituted some reforms suggested by
Wealth
. Alexander Hamilton, architect of American protectionism, did not. More than two and a quarter centuries after
Wealth
's publication – what with the neomercantilists running China, the opposition to globalization being voiced around the globe, and the occasional rock getting thrown through the window of a Starbucks because it doesn't foster 'sustainable development' among coffee bean growers – the jury is still out.
    Meanwhile Adam Smith continues to bear witness.
The Wealth of Nations
is more than an explanation, an analysis, or an argument. It is a sermon. And a fire-and-brimstone sermon at that. Smith is famous for supposedly favoring laissez-faire (a term that appears nowhere in his writing) and for allegedly trusting the 'invisible hand' of capitalist progress. But Smith knew the hand could grasp: 'People of the same trade seldom meet together … but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.' 10
    Smith realized that a broadly prosperous consumer-oriented economy would not change human nature: 'The prideof man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors.' 11 Truthfully, that's how we feel every time we ask to be paid for our services or goods.
    Smith did believe free markets could better the world. He once said, in a paper delivered to a learned society, that progress required 'little else … but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'. 12 But those three things were then – and are now – the three hardest things in the world to find.
    Smith preached against the gravitational load of power and privilege that always will, if it can, fall upon our livelihood.
The Wealth of Nations
is a sturdy bulwark of a homily on liberty and honest enterprise. It does go on and on. But sermons must last a long time for the same reason that walls must. The wall isn't trying to change the roof's mind about crushing us.

CHAPTER 3
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In the Augean Stables of the Human Condition, Adam Smith Tries to Muck Out the Stalls
    The unprinted subtitle of this Grove/Atlantic series on world-changing books is 'Works Which Let's Admit You'll Never Read the Whole Of'. William Kristol, editor of the
Weekly Standard
and a more erudite man than I, has a nice phrase for such tomes. He says he has 'read
in
them'. Happily, we may so do with
The Wealth of Nations
. Unhappily, there's Adam Smith's first book, which we do not read at all. And
Wealth
cannot be understood without understanding
The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
published by Smith in 1759.
    Adam Smith devoted most of his career to a single philosophical project, the betterment of life. A modern reader – or a modern reader who doesn't wear Birkenstocks – is tempted to laugh. It is a hilariously big job. But many of us have undertaken hilariously big jobs such as raising children. We were lured into the enterprise by the, so to speak, pleasures of conception. New beginnings are always fun. And Smith wasintellectually in bed with the virgin idea of betterment. The prospect of making wholesale improvements in ordinary life was as fascinating in the eighteenth century as the prospects of making life simpler and less stressful and of blocking