FYI, kiddos:
The Betrayal Of Adam Smith
From
When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten
Kumarian Press and Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995
"Proponents of
corporate libertarianism regularly pay homage to Adam Smith as their intellectual patron saint. His writing remains to this day the intellectual foundation of policies advanced in the name of market freedom that are allowing a few hundred corporations to consolidate their control over markets all over the world. See
An Economic System Dangerously Out of Control.
Ironically, Smith's epic work
The Wealth of Nations, which was first published in 1776, presents a radical condemnation of business monopolies sustained and protected by the state. Adam Smith's ideal was a market comprised solely of small buyers and sellers. He showed how the workings of such a market would tend toward a price that provides a fair return to land, labor, and capital, produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers, and result in an optimal outcome for society in terms of the allocation of its resources.
He made clear, however, that this outcome can result only when no buyer or seller is sufficiently large to influence the market price—a point many who invoke his name prefer not to mention. Such a market implicitly assumes a significant degree of equality in the distribution of economic power—another widely neglected point.
Indeed, Smith was almost fanatical in his opposition to any kind of monopoly power, which he defined as the power of a seller to maintain a price for an indefinite time above its natural price. Indeed, he asserted that trade secrets confer a monopoly advantage and are contrary to the principles of a free market. He would surely have strongly opposed current efforts by market libertarians to strengthen corporate monopoly control of intellectual property rights through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The idea that a major corporation might have exclusive control over a lifesaving drug or device and thereby be able to charge whatever the market will bear would have been anathema to him.
Furthermore, Smith did not advocate a market system based on unrestrained greed. He was talking about small farmers and artisans trying to get the best price for their products to provide for themselves and their families. That is self-interest—but it is not greed. Greed is a high paid corporate executive firing 10,000 employees and then rewarding himself with a multimillion dollar bonus for having saved the company so much money. Greed is what the economic system being constructed by the corporate libertarians encourages and rewards.
Smith had a strong dislike for both governments and corporations. He viewed government primarily as instruments for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and for intervening in the market to protect monopoly. In his words, "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." Smith made no mention of government intervention to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest—to protect the poor against the rich. We can imagine that given the experience of his day the possibility never occurred to him."
The theory of market economics, as contrasted to free market ideology, specifies a number of basic conditions needed for a market to set prices efficiently in the public interest. The greater the violation of these conditions, the less efficient the market system. Most basic is the condition that markets must be competitive. I recall the professor in my elementary economics course using the example of a market comprised of small wheat farmers selling to small grain millers to illustrate the idea of perfect market competition. Today, four companies—Conagra, ADM Milling, Cargill, and Pillsbury—mill nearly 60 percent of all flour produced in the United States, and two of them—Conagra and Cargill—control 50 percent of grain exports."
The Betrayal of Adam Smith