Word: adams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some of the thinkers who followed Adam Smith had made capitalism seem heartless indeed. The Rev. Thomas Malthus grimly announced that no person has any claim on society for a "right to subsistence when his labor will not fairly purchase it." David Ricardo worked out what became known as the "iron law of wages." His thesis: workers in the long run would get only the bare minimum necessary to keep themselves and their families alive. If they temporarily should earn more, they would breed so many children that competition for jobs eventually would drive wages down again. Ricardo...
Unhappily, the systems of Adam Smith, and even of Keynes, give little guidance as to how to cope with the malaise. Much of the explosive 1973-74 inflation, of course, resulted from what economists call "random shocks" to the system: oil price gouging by the OPEC cartel and food shortages caused largely by unusual weather. But the underlying inflationary momentum seems to be supplied by modern capitalist democracy...
...stutter and stammer for at least a quarter of an hour before hitting his oratorical stride. Contemporaries loved to talk about the night that he got out of bed absorbed in some theory and wandered 15 miles in his dressing gown before thinking to wonder where he was. Altogether, Adam Smith was scarcely the man to whom an ambitious moneymaker would turn for guidance on the intensely practical questions of how prices, profits and wages are determined...
...democratic leaders choose the correct policies and explain them forthrightly?a distressingly big if?the prospects are not all bleak. Enough remains of Adam Smith's self-adjusting market to give the policymakers some assistance. If, as seems likely, the recent recession has broken the force of inflation, the slowing of price rises will probably encourage consumers later this year to begin buying many more cars, appliances and other goods. Then businessmen who have been zealously cutting inventories might find themselves with too little stock to maintain sales and would be forced to step up production...
...stresses the accumulation and use of capital-and all forms of economic organization do that. Some free-enterprisers even shun the word because it was popularized by Karl Marx and other socialist thinkers as a name for a system that they were attacking, and it retains a pejorative flavor. Adam Smith never mentioned capitalism in any of his works; he preferred the term natural order...