What Adam Smith Did Not Anticipate

He did not know that successful businessmen would do their best to circumvent the workings of the Market - to their own advantage. And this would not be hard for them to do.

I am reading The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought an excellent book that everyone should read - but few do. The second chapter is about Adam Smith, an important person by all accounts.

When I grew up, I agreed with him - and was shocked to find how it really was in the Business World, where I ended up working.

Successful (and unscrupulous) people studied how the Market was working - and devised ways of exploiting it. Smith assumed people were intelligent and hard to deceive - but these manipulators of the Market, knew better. The Market had many panics, booms and busts - all due to human foolishness.

I spent 15 years working for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) a huge gravy train, that benefited those on it - at the expense of everyone else. No one in the Agency questioned this, in fact they made sure no one did - and squashed without mercy, anyone who started to. This was not considered terrorism - but it sure was.

Any group of people can decide to benefit themselves, at the expense of others - and can sometimes do this for hundreds of years - until the whole thing comes crashing down.

Everyone in these situations, should ask themselves "How much longer can this last?" But they don't - they blind themselves instead, and rush towards the nearest cliff. The impulse to self-destruct is a strong as the impulse to self-construct.

Once they are in free-fall, they may wonder a little - but even after they hit bottom, they know nothing. They were selected because they knew nothing - and they continue to know nothing.