To see my response to Thomas Wells and Bruce Elmslie’s reviews of the essay “Free Enterprise and the Economics of Slavery” in Real World Economic Review, see the current issue: http://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/rwer-issue-55-marvin-brown/#more-3465
If you want to understand the foundation of libertarianism, there is no better place to look than Adam Smith’s view of property relations.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, or almost a thousand. As I demonstrate in Civilizing the Economy, Adam Smith knew that the slave-based tobacco trade was a major source of wealth in Scotland and especially in Glasgow, where he lived when collecting material for The Wealth of Nations. Instead of telling us this, he tells us about the invisible hand, a good illustration of what we can call the economics of dissociation: a process of splitting off the misery of the real providers of wealth and then feeling optimistic about market dynamics.
In his article on Adam Smith, Adam Gopnik leaves out a couple of important facts about the life of Adam Smith that provide clues to a very different story than the one Gopnik tells. First of all, there is Adam Smith’s request that all his papers be burned after his death. Everything. And this was done. Why such a request? Was Smith hiding something? It turns out he was: something that has remained hidden from many admirers of Smith, including Gopnik.
One of the key ideas in modern economics is the idea of scarcity. In fact, sometimes economics is defined as the “allocation of resources in the context of scarcity.”
Scarcity means that there is not enough to go around. If everyone had access to everything they desire, there would be no economics. There would be no need to determine how to allocate resources. At least that is one view of the field of economics. This notion of scarcity, however, is a bit more complicated than it might appear.
Marvin T. Brown, Ph.D teaches business and organizational ethics at the University of San Francisco and Saybrook University in San Francisco.
This book is the culmination of 30 years of teaching and writing on business and society from a communicative perspective. Visit workingethics.com for more information.
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