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/lit/ - Literature

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2544500 No.2544500 [Reply] [Original]

The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelmen suggests that Adam Smith was a statist who needed to promote laissez-faire capitalism in order to encourage strong government policies that would push the poor into wage-slavery.

Has anyone read it?

>> No.2544511

No, but I live in Edinburgh and saw a group of Greek tourists (I know the language a little) posing for pictures beside our statue of Smith a few weeks ago. I found it pretty amusing.

>> No.2544519
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2544519

I haven't read it, but how does that make sense? Laissez-faire is essentially 100% voluntary economic interaction between people/corporate entities, how does that tie in with "strong government policies?"

>> No.2544525

>>2544519
I think he means gov't policies that tilt strongly towards unfettered markets.

>> No.2544527

>>2544519
The capitalists needed to push peasants away from their farms and into factories. To do this, capitalists lobbied to enact laws which destroyed traditional peasant means of support. Thus peasants were compelled to become hourly workers in industrialized societies.

>> No.2544530

>>2544519
To have "corporate entities" you needed strong government policies and intervention.

All of a sudden, peasants couldn't just trade a portion of your year's harvest with a friend's. The government put policies in place that prevented such peasant-to-peasant dealings, forcing them to go through corporations instead.

>> No.2544541
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2544541

>>2544530
Does Smith advocate this sort of thing in his work? I've never actually read any of his material.

I would assume, from my incomplete view of the issue, that laissez-faire would mean that farmers would be able to do whatever they wanted with their surpluses, or else it wouldn't be a truly free market.
What you seem to describing is a corporatist system in which the powers that be manipulate the laws to create barriers to entry and government aided monopolization.

>> No.2544602

>>2544541
Smith didn't advocate this in The Wealth of Nations. Perelmen's book is interesting because he looks into the personal papers and correspondence of Smith and contemporaries. Perelmen tries to make the case that the story most people are told about capitalism and the motives of the first capitalists is completely wrong.

>> No.2544612

>>2544602
That's sounds kind of interesting, I'm a (moderate) libertarian, but I'll have to keep an eye out for it so I can give it a read.