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Smith advocates a tax naturally attached to the "abilities" and habits of each echelon of society.
For the lower echelon, Smith recognized the intellectually erosive effect that the otherwise beneficial division of labour can have on workers, what Marx, though he mainly opposes Smith, later named "alienation,"; therefore, Smith warns of the consequence of government failing to fulfill its proper role, which is to preserve against the innate tendency of human society to fall apart.
..."the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."[15]
Why do you support making specialization and competition the supreme value of society when Adam Smith himself claims that would be morally bad?
Why do you interpret Adam Smith CONTRARY to what he actually said (predicating society on specialization is bad) but PARALLEL to powerful interests in the here and now?
What elements of the state, exactly, do you think oppose free enterprise?
Why do you think the gold standard is better than paper money?
Azelma wrote:
He took all the risk, used his own money to start the business...why shouldn't he receive the fruits of his labor?
Except it's not true...
1. Unless a businessperson is "Robinson Crusoe", a business is built with someone else's money, be it a bank, investors or Mom & Dad. Is not the premise of free enterprise investment...and is not the premise of investment the use of someone else's money? If it's someone else's money, clearly the risk is NOT entirely that of the owner.
2. You say the "majority owner" "invested his own cash". Is the business a privately owned sole proprietorship? Where did he get the cash?
3. Most of the best paid executives did NOT start their own businesses, they were appointed by the Powers That Be to head existing enterprises. For example - did McCain start Godfather's?
4. Why do the execs deserve all credit given that society created the conditions, both human and material, for their success?
5. If a big business goes under, haven't the workers who have established a long-term relationship with them ALSO lost their lives due to "risk", and not just the execs?
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Look no further than the disaster that was the governments bail outs. The government should have let them fail.
Why didn't it?
