I dearly love comment sections on certain websites. Some are entertaining, and some are guaranteed to lead to links for further thought. Others are stocked with slogans and utterances of magical thought without caveat. However, what can be missed are those posts which do not draw much comment…it needs to be mentioned that these posts […]

Gavin Kennedy reminds us that handy metaphors used to sell fictions about either free markets or ‘the force’ at work are just that: Smith is a conjecture about the virtues of a free-market economy”, is so absurd as to be embarrassing.  That Adam Smith favoured “a free market economy” is approximately correct.  That he asserted that a […]

by guest poster Gavin Kennedy (Rdan-A reader comments on the Research Agenda post on Adam Smith. The comments could not handle the volume of text, so I took the liberty of putting up the comment and the response. Good work guys): The reader suggests Mr. Gavin consider the following quote and his explanation:Adam Smith in […]

by cactus Norman Borlaug, Michael Jackson, and the Invisible Hand When Adam Smith described the concept of laissez-faire capitalism, he argued that it was not just efficient but moral. As long as everyone acted in their own self-interest and the government did not interfere, the Invisible Hand would guide market forces toward the best possible […]