Read On the Wealth of Nations Online
Authors: P.J. O'Rourke
On the Wealth of Nations (12 page)
In the course of little more than a century, perhaps, the produce of American might exceed that of British taxation. The seat of the empire would then naturally remove itself to that part of the empire which contributed most to the general defence and support of the whole.
28
If Smith's dream had been effected sooner, in 1776 instead of during the Iraq War, we'd be living in a different world. There might have been no American Civil War, world wars, Cold War, or poke-noses from the EU Commission on Everything. On the other hand, there might have been ten thousand Belfasts where 'a military government would naturally be established' and where a billion people were 'at all times ready to take arms in order to overturn it'.
As it is, we're living in a different world anyway. And it's interesting that Smith didn't have the dream about America that actually came true. The United States would prove Adam Smith's own thesis: wealth depends on division of labor; division of labor depends on trade; trade depends on natural liberty; therefore Freedom = Wealth.
If anything the United States has provided an embarrassment of proof. What will archaeologists of the distant future make of the American empire's ruins? They'll dig up SUVs obviously too big ever to have moved. They must have been for ceremonial purposes. The ubiquitous remains of swimming pools, the countless types and kinds of sneakers, and the ruins of more fast-food outlets than any estimate of twenty-first-century population can account for will convince thirty-first-century scholars that we were semiaquatic, six-legged creatures who worshipped fat in cars.
But Adam Smith was too practical a man to dream up anything that silly. And since we Americans are ourselves so practical we should heed not only what Smith had to say
about our revolution but what he had to say about the thing that our revolution eventually would get us, an empire like Britain's.
The lambasting that Smith gave to the British imperialists could be given to anyone who intends to profit from an empire. It doesn't matter if the expected gain is crass â commercial prosperity â or noble â democracy. A successful empire is not an array of cowed dependencies, importunate client states, and outposts held by bribery or force. 'They may perhaps,' Smith wrote, 'be considered as appendages, as a sort of splendid and showy equipage of the empire.'
29
Adam Smith thought that the mistakes of British imperial policy were so grave and so dangerous to individuals that he used an ardent condemnation of that policy as his final passage in
The Wealth of Nations:
The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine ⦠It is surely now time that our rulers should either realize this golden dream, in which they have been indulging themselves, perhaps, as well as the people; or, that they should awake from it themselves, and endeavour to awaken the people. If the project cannot be completed, it ought to be given up ⦠Great Britain should free herself
from the expence of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.
30
The Wealth of Nations,
Book 5 'Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth' Adam Smith, Policy Wonk
Adam Smith was human, and never more so than in book 5 of
The Wealth of Nations
. No one can resist giving advice. As a 'solitary philosopher', Adam Smith's advice was good. He applied his lofty intellect to such great political issues as the war in America. But in book 5 he also applied his intellect to mundane political issues. He yielded to the temptation to slide down Olympus.
Smith should have known better than to enmesh himself in the bureaucratic details of public policy. In
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
he warned against thinkers 'who reduced their doctrines into a ⦠technical system of artificial definitions, divisions, and subdivisions'.
1
Smith called this 'one of the most effectual expedients, perhaps, for extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral or metaphysical doctrine'.
2
Smith risked becoming as 'wise in his own conceit' as James Carville, Karl Rove, or Anthony Giddens. Already in book 4, on the subject of Spanish versus British colonies, Smith had embraced the central fallacy of the political advisor, the same fallacy he'd detected in the physiocrats: 'what forms the character of every nation, the nature of their government'.
3
By the middle of book 5 Smith was holding forth like a world-weary Washington insider after a day full of the momentarily momentous policy crises beloved of world-weary Washington insiders:
For though management and persuasion are always the easiest and the safest instruments of government, as force and violence are the worst and the most dangerous, yet such, it seems, is the natural insolence of man, that he almost always disdains to use the good instrument, except when he cannot or dare not use the bad one.
4
The mundane political issues of Smith's time were â it is sad to discover â exactly the same as ours: law and order, political pork, failures of the educational system, religion in politics, Byzantine tax code, burgeoning national debt, and runaway defense spending. Two and a quarter centuries of intractability in these policy matters would seem to indicate a certain ⦠intractability.
If we reconciled ourselves to this intractability, the modern overpopulation of political advisors, commentators, and experts could be culled. Space could be opened up in the
New
York Times
for more lingerie ads. And Sunday morning TV partisan blather could be replaced with reruns of
Curb Your Enthusiasm
. If we wanted to have an opinion about some pressing issue, we could read book 5 of
Wealth
and spout the mixed-up pronouncements of Adam Smith.
Despite the title of this section, Smith didn't have much to say about the expense of justice other than that it's expensive. 'Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country,'
5
wrote Smith, putting a more dignified gloss on the comment of actor and murder suspect Robert Blake who said he was 'innocent until proven broke'.
Smith lamented that the origin of judicial systems had more to do with sovereign revenue than sovereign fairness: 'The persons who applied to [the king] for justice were always willing to pay for it ⦠This scheme of making the administration of justice subservient to the purposes of revenue, could scarce fail to be productive of several very gross abuses.'
6
I'm thinking of speeding tickets in a certain New Hampshire small town which I won't name because I live there.
I'll have to drive more slowly because Smith, like the political analysts of today, was at his best with the big picture. Smith was articulate on the enormous question, what is the abstract nature of justice? He was not so articulate on the small question, how do I get some?
Adam Smith was so articulate on the abstract nature of justice that he could have gone into a television studio by himself and been the host and all the guests on a Fox News show.
'Civil government ⦠is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor,'
7
Smith wrote, sounding like the obligatory left-wing nut guest.
Then he sounded like the right-wing nut host: 'in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property.'
8
Then the left-wing nut again: 'Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.'
9
And then the guest who is even more of a right-wing nut than the host and who has had too much coffee: 'It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property ⦠can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease.'
10
It all comes down to campaign strategies in the end. These civil magistrates, these politicos â laying down the law and meting out justice â who will they be? In choosing political leaders, Smith ruled out 'qualifications of the mind', which he considered to be 'always disputable, and generally disputed'.
11
(As if qualifications of the mind were ever a factor in politics.) And successful businessmen are not the best candidates, because, Smith opined, 'authority of fortune ⦠has been the constant complaint of every period of society.'
12
(Plus so many rich
people have been going to jail lately, not that that distinguishes them from politicians.) Smith thought chronological age had something to recommend it, being 'a plain and palpable quality which admits of no dispute'.
13
In politics you can still be a fresh face and full of potential at fifty-three â Smith's age when
Wealth of Nations
was published. But what Smith favored most in political leaders was 'superiority of birth ⦠antiquity either of wealth, or of that greatness which is commonly either founded upon wealth, or accompanied with it'.
14
Smith believed that such a person's 'birth and fortune ⦠naturally procure him some sort of ⦠authority'.
15
What an incredibly archaic opinion. Maybe Smith isn't fit for appearances on modern media after all. Unless you consider the pair of blue-blooded bums on the plush who ran for president of the United States in 2004.
Doubtless Smith would have positioned himself as being above vulgar politics. Perhaps he would have supported both Bush and Kerry. But he couldn't have expected much abstract justice from what either of them wanted to do to the Supreme Court: 'When the judicial is united to the executive power,' Smith wrote, 'it is scarce possible that justice should not frequently be sacrificed to, what is vulgarly called, politics.'
16
Smith did have one concrete suggestion to improve the justice system: competing law courts, where 'each court endeavoured, by superior dispatch and impartiality, to draw to itself as many causes as it could.'
17
This is a great idea â for a TV show. It's done wonders for Judge Judy, if not for the United States Court of Appeals.
Nothing about pork barrel politics has changed since the eighteenth century. This is clear from a statement that Adam Smith felt compelled to make: 'A great bridge cannot be thrown over a river at a place where nobody passes, or merely to embellish the view from the windows of a neighbouring palace.'
18
He was using the verb
cannot
in the strictly political sense, its meaning unrelated to
won't
. The next words in Smith's sentence are 'things which sometimes happen'.
Smith made an incontrovertible pronouncement about the funding of public works: 'The greater part of such ⦠may easily be so managed, as to afford a particular revenue sufficient for defraying their own expence.'
19
And he made an incontrovertible pronouncement that there was no hope in hell of getting that funding to go where it was supposed to: 'In the progress of despotism the authority of the executive power gradually absorbs that of every other power in the state, and assumes to itself the management of every branch of revenue.'
20
Smith understood the potential of privatization: 'Public services are never better performed than when their reward comes only in consequence of their being performed, and is proportioned to the diligence employed in performing them.'
21
But his experience of the corporations that were contracted to perform British government services â such as the East India Company, the Halliburton of its day â left him
too skeptical to suggest privatization: 'These companies ⦠have in the long-run proved, universally, either burdensome or useless.'
22
All that Smith could do about pork barrel projects was voice the kind of feckless common sense that never influences politics: 'they can be made only where that commerce requires them, and ⦠their grandeur and magnificence, must be suited to what that commerce can afford to pay.'
23
He would have been helpless to prevent the recent US highway transportation bill with its $200 million bridge in Ketchikan, Alaska (population 7,410). But at least Smith wouldn't have proposed a Millennium Dome in London or vast housing estates for malcontents in the suburbs of Paris or rebuilding slums below sea level so college kids have a place to get drunk during Mardi Gras.
'Of the Expence of the Institutions for the Education of Youth'
Any discussion of educational policy quickly turns into a blow-top session. Everyone's been stuffed with sixteen or twenty years of school, is full to the brim, and ready to spew. Smith was no exception, calling universities 'the sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection, after they had been hunted out of every other corner of the world'.
24
Smith propounded his educational theories. He was in favor of more science: 'The proper subject of experiment and observation, a subject in which a careful attention is capable
of making so many useful discoveries.'
25
He was against subjects 'in which, after a few very simple and almost obvious truths, the most careful attention can discover nothing but obscurity and uncertainty'.
26
He was referring to metaphysics, but we can substitute poststructuralist minority feminist gay literary criticism and take his point. He cited, approvingly, the ancient Greek curriculum of 'physics, or natural philosophy; ethics, or moral philosophy; and logic', maintaining that 'this general division seems perfectly agreeable to the nature of things.'
27
Although I'm not sure where Auto Shop, Phys Ed, and lunch would fit in. And he denounced ontology, calling it 'this cobweb science',
28
which was a relief to me because I got a D on that quiz in Introduction to Philosophy.
But reasonable opinions go only so far on educational issues. Smith was soon in controversial territory. He was opposed to making education wholly free, lest students get what they paid for. And he protested against government control of schools: 'An extraneous jurisdiction of this kind ⦠is liable to be exercised both ignorantly and capriciously.'
29
Smith, a teacher himself, knew what political pressure does to teachers:
The person subject to such jurisdiction is necessarily degraded by it, and, instead of being one of the most respectable, is rendered one of the meanest and most contemptible persons in the society. It is by powerful protection only that he can effectually guard himself
against the bad usage to which he is at all times exposed; and this protection he is most likely to gain, not by ability or diligence in his profession, but by obsequiousness to the will of his superiors.
30
Otherwise known as joining a teachers' union and voting for liberal Democrats.
Smith assailed compulsory education as well. 'There are no public institutions for the education of women,' he wrote, 'and there is accordingly nothing useless, absurd, or fantastical in the common course of their education.'
31
You didn't catch eighteenth-century housewives bursting into angry tears during book group discussions of
Are Men Necessary?
They couldn't read.
Smith touted private schools. He claimed that 'those parts of education ⦠for the teaching of which there are no public institutions, are generally the best taught.'
32
As examples he gave 'a fencing or a dancing school'.
33
But I've got three children and they spend enough time waltzing around taking pokes at each other.
In heated dispute with Smith on all these points was Smith. He advocated an educational requirement 'to be undergone by every person before he was permitted to exercise any liberal profession'.
34
He called for taxpayer funding of schools: 'some attention of government is necessary in order to prevent the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people.'
35
And he wanted national curriculum
standards: 'Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.'
36
Neither of Smith's educational agendas has worked. That is, all the arguments he made against public education are true. And all the arguments he made in favor of public education haven't prevented the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people, at least when they're watching
American Idol
. Nor has science been a great antidote for enthusiasm, such as Iran's for building an atomic bomb, or for superstition. The lotto jackpot number last week was my locker combination in high school.
We get as confused reading what Adam Smith wrote about education as he got writing it. Doubtless part of the confusion was due to the fact of Smith's being a teacher and knowing the truth about school. 'No better method, it seems, could be fallen upon of spending, with any advantage, the long interval between infancy and that period of life at which men begin to apply in good earnest to the real business of the world,'
37
he wrote. The secret to education is that we don't know what else to do with the kids.