Louis René Beres: What Conservatives Ignore in Adam Smith's Message is Killing Our Economy

Louis René Beres is a professor of International Law at Purdue University. The author of ten major books and several hundred scholarly articles on world affairs, his columns appear in many major American and European newspapers and magazines.

In virtually all current political debate concerning the requirements of American prosperity, the classic argument of Adam Smith remains the fashionable mainstay of conservatives. It was Smith, after all, who reasoned capably and persuasively that a system of private property, although naturally unequal, would nonetheless permit the poor to live tolerably.

Rejecting Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s fully contrary position that, in commerce, “the privileged few...gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life,” Smith saw in capitalism not only rising productivity, but also the ultimate condition for political liberty.

Significantly, perhaps, Adam Smith published his “Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” in 1776. A revolutionary book, “Wealth” did not aim to support the interests of any one class over another, but rather the overall well-being of an entire nation. Smith discovered, of course, “an invisible hand,” an utterly unsought convergence whereby “the private interests and passions of men” will lead to “that which is most agreeable to the interest of a whole society.”

Through capitalistic modes of production and exchange, therefore, reasoned Smith, an inextinguishable social inequality might still be reconciled with broad human progress....