Posted: Apr 16, 2011 10:03 pm
The Plc wrote: Reading Wealth of Nations is actually quite a shock when your preconception of Smith is based on the image constructed by right wing think tanks and such. Smith was strongly opposed to excessive concentration of capital for example, and worker inequity. It's particularly notable for it's examination of mercantilism and imperialism. He advocated what we would call today social democratic or democratic socialist policies, such poverty relief, better working standards, economic democracy, and iinterestingly secular education for children and adults, free from the 'mad enthusiasm' of the religious.
That is it exactly! That is what happened to me when I watched Galbraith's Age of Uncertainty. We are bombarded with economic propaganda which distorts the ideas to serve selected purposes. Galbraith himself gets more bad press than good and his books have practically disappeared from bookstore. The system depends on most people being disenfranchised via confusion and ignorance. Milton Friedman came out with Free to Choose a bit later but it really just said, Believe in Capitalism and it will set you Free.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3N2sNnGwa4
It is propagandistic crap.
A few years ago I even emailed the BBC to find out how I could get Age of Uncertainty. Until someone uploaded it to YouTube I had not seen it in 30 years. I still don't how to get it besides downloading it off YouTube. I have the book that I bought in 1977 though. I would suggest that sooner than reading Smith and Marx. An intelligent analysis can be worth more than trying to read the original because there is just too much original stuff to read and I don't want to know as much about economics as Galbraith did to be able to do as good an analysis.
psik