"Private Vices into Public Virtues"

[elfs]

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is widely regarded as the first comprehensive and systematic treatise on how merchantilism and capitalism actually work.

Smith's observation is twofold: First, the nation-as-marketplace involves the interaction of all the people of the nation, and their interactions have emergent properties (desires either

Comments

[galadrion]

The ultimate private vice is greed, and it's going to take a lot of political pressure for incremental reform to rein that in, even for one more generation.

The unstated (and unsupported) assumption in this statement is that it (greed) should be reigned in. Bear in mind that this oligarchal capture-societal stagnation-societal reform cycle is the ratchet mechanism which has driven social advancement for as long as we have historical records.

[elfs]

The term "reined in" implies transitioning a horse from an out-of-control, careening gallop to something the rider can manage without fear. It's not the same thing as "stop."

The unstated assumption in your rebuttal is that painful cycles are a necessary part of the economic cycle.