Comment by dredmorbius

6 hours ago

"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes said, is power."

-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776

More significantly, one of the first discussions within the text of precisely what wealth is (on which Smith has several, and occasionally inconsistent, answers, and which he seems to think of as more a flow than a stock.)

One of Smith's principle complaints in his text was what we now call "market failures" and "regulatory capture".

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...>

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/>

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dredmorbius

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