Adam Smith, Class Warrior: The Left-Right Spectrum

[Pauls' Revere]

https://www.libertarianism.org/colum...entious-legacy

[sic]
Another nineteenth century figure sitting at the strange and fascinating intersection of liberalism, socialism, and libertarianism is the American publisher Benjamin R. Tucker, whose work also bears the telltale marks of Smith’s influence. Smith was a pioneer in the use of the concept of economic equilibrium, a hypothesized state of balance toward which free markets are constantly tending. This chimerical idea of an economy in equilibrium, with perfect competition and perfectly stable prices, provided American individualist anarchists like Tucker with their distinctive theory of exploitation. They believed that genuinely free competition, defined very much as today’s libertarians define it, would mean a perfect identity between cost and price, competitive pressures allowing for no space between the two. This conclusion has been much less than clear to the free market faithful in the time since individualist anarchism of the Tucker kind went extinct.3 The salient class analysis lessons of this individualist anarchist tradition nonetheless remain: free market competition is not to blame for the inequalities and prevalent abuses of corporate power of which the commentaries of the left quite justifiably complain. If the state is the root cause of these problems, then looking to state planning and intervention to solve them would seem to be absurd.

[sic]
Given these rather uncontroversial historical connections, the contemporary conversation about wealth inequality, social justice, and class conflict as it exists within the capitalist system seems to beg for a radical rethinking. Pundits on both left and right seem to have forgotten what old-time liberals and libertarians articulated so compellingly—that liberty and equality come and go together, a mated pair. The liberal thought revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, led by giants like Smith, created a world in which we just assume that people of all backgrounds and classes are equal in their rights and deserve to be free. Carried to their conclusions, these simple principles have much transformative work left to do.

[Ender]

https://www.libertarianism.org/colum...entious-legacy

[sic]
Another nineteenth century figure sitting at the strange and fascinating intersection of liberalism, socialism, and libertarianism is the American publisher Benjamin R. Tucker, whose work also bears the telltale marks of Smith’s influence. Smith was a pioneer in the use of the concept of economic equilibrium, a hypothesized state of balance toward which free markets are constantly tending. This chimerical idea of an economy in equilibrium, with perfect competition and perfectly stable prices, provided American individualist anarchists like Tucker with their distinctive theory of exploitation. They believed that genuinely free competition, defined very much as today’s libertarians define it, would mean a perfect identity between cost and price, competitive pressures allowing for no space between the two. This conclusion has been much less than clear to the free market faithful in the time since individualist anarchism of the Tucker kind went extinct.3 The salient class analysis lessons of this individualist anarchist tradition nonetheless remain: free market competition is not to blame for the inequalities and prevalent abuses of corporate power of which the commentaries of the left quite justifiably complain. If the state is the root cause of these problems, then looking to state planning and intervention to solve them would seem to be absurd.

[sic]
Given these rather uncontroversial historical connections, the contemporary conversation about wealth inequality, social justice, and class conflict as it exists within the capitalist system seems to beg for a radical rethinking. Pundits on both left and right seem to have forgotten what old-time liberals and libertarians articulated so compellingly—that liberty and equality come and go together, a mated pair. The liberal thought revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, led by giants like Smith, created a world in which we just assume that people of all backgrounds and classes are equal in their rights and deserve to be free. Carried to their conclusions, these simple principles have much transformative work left to do.

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