Not a Smithian Market
Buddy Walker, ‘Columnist’ (‘Give me liberty, illegal drugs or give me death’) in The Daily Athenaeum, West Virginia University
“Drug dealers are not evil by definition - they are simply the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand on a market forced into the shadows.”
Read it at: http://www.da.wvu.edu/XMLParser/printstory.phtml?id=22039
Comment
The drug trade is hardly a Smithian market. Drug gangs are oligopolists trying to become monopolists by killing rivals, not competing on price or quality.
Of all the anti-monopoly sentences Smith wrote I do not recall him associating markets with murderous violence or with disregard for the consumers. Quite the reverse. He would recognise such behaviour in theEast India Company, a chartered monopoly that devasted the Indian sub-continent.
On the latest misuse of the invisible hand metaphor and associating it with Adam Smith, I have no comment.
“Drug dealers are not evil by definition - they are simply the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand on a market forced into the shadows.”
Read it at: http://www.da.wvu.edu/XMLParser/printstory.phtml?id=22039
Comment
The drug trade is hardly a Smithian market. Drug gangs are oligopolists trying to become monopolists by killing rivals, not competing on price or quality.
Of all the anti-monopoly sentences Smith wrote I do not recall him associating markets with murderous violence or with disregard for the consumers. Quite the reverse. He would recognise such behaviour in theEast India Company, a chartered monopoly that devasted the Indian sub-continent.
On the latest misuse of the invisible hand metaphor and associating it with Adam Smith, I have no comment.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home