How come this chap was so wise so long ago?:
“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful and…neglect persons of poor and mean condition…is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
It's Adam Smith, of course, From The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Quoted in Tony Judt, 'Ill Fares the Land'. Strongly recommended.
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Exactly Richard. I’m waiting for the Adam Smith Institute to point this out as well; how long do you think that’ll be?
When hell freezes over
It is notable that The Adam Smith Institute lists its influences as “Adam Smith”, “Friedrich Hayek” & “Milton Friedman”.
It’s like naming your moral influences as Spinoza, Nietzsche and Ayn Rand.
Adam Smith is just used for window dressing on nakedly neo-liberal propaganda.
‘No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable’
Also Adam Smith, and another the Institute that jokingly bears his name wouldn’t really want to broadcast I suspect.
Also from Tony Judt (some cracking quotes throughout, Richard).
The book is brilliant
Thanks for recommending
It’s littered with good quotes
Some may appear here
Power follows wealth.
Corruption follows greed.
Helplessness follows poverty.
Power follows wealth
Corruption follows greed
Helplessness follows poverty
Nor are the Adam Smith Institute likely soon – or ever? – to acknowledge how profoundly Adam Smith mistrusted businessmen, whose instincts he saw as anti-social – as in the following: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Corruption follows greed
Power follows wealth
Helplessness follows poverty
How come this chap was so wise so long ago?
Not an original thought: the writer of the New Testament Letter of James took an equally robust line towards that sort of behaviour seventeen centuries earlier.
More required reading by Tony Judt (who died in August 2010) is the “The Memory Chalet”
In fact read every work that has ever been published by this remarkable man.