Adam Smith vs. Occupational Licensing
From the "Nothing New Under the Sun" Files
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations proffers abundant, and often strikingly modern, economic wisdom. To take a largely forgotten instance, the Scot excoriates the toxic interplay of big government and big labor as an immoral incursion on the liberties of both workers and their prospective employers.
This author discussed all this at the American Institute for Economic Research:
“The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” Smith argues. “The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; but to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property.”
Property rights begin with the ownership of oneself. The individual’s bodily and mental autonomy (when left unmolested by the state) empowers him, through his labor, to create economic value for his fellows. Price signals — written by the market’s invisible hand — help the businessperson or laborer maximize his usefulness to others (and his profits).
In Smith’s conception, workforce specialization begets efficiency and prosperity. Each specialized worker exchanges his own products for those he cannot himself create. Individuals “find it for their interest to employ their whole industry in a way in which they have some advantage over their neighbours, and to purchase with a part of its produce, or what is the same thing, with the price of a part of it, whatever else they have occasion for.” Thus, free, complex, and far-flung markets — bound together by webs of commerce — produce among their participants mutual reliance, collaboration, and wealth.
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Smith understood the special nature of labor interests’ relationship with government. He noted that “The government of towns corporate was altogether in the hands of traders and artificers.”
Smith’s discussion of guilds, the Big Labor of yore, seems astonishingly apt to today — particularly where he suggests freedom of employment as an antidote to the creative destruction capitalism invariably entails.
Smith wrote for his contemporaries. But like all great thinkers, he also spoke to everybody — of all generations.
Read the full piece.
Some Wisdom
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) provides perhaps the most eloquent defense of free speech ever penned. He recapitulates his arguments for tolerating dissenting views:
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
Another Englishman, John Milton, defended free speech two centuries earlier in Areopagitica:
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
Some Beauty
“Do Not Ask Your Children To Strive,” by William Martin:
Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.
Many extraordinary historical figures — e.g., John Adams — took extraordinary pleasure from the ordinary. And Martin was partially wrong: Striving is, in fact, good and necessary and healthy. But one can — and ought to — endeavor it while preserving the capacity to wonder at everyday miracles.
Some Levity
Remy, Reason’s musical parodist extraordinaire, has a take on “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
Despite their humorousness, Remy’s lyrics diagnose the federal government’s dysfunctions far better than Oliver Anthony’s. Bureaucracy and big, centralized government — not a malicious cabal of self-interested politicians — are the prime culprits.
Sundry Links, &c.
In Townhall: The European Carbon Tariff Fails on Both Environmentalist and Economic Terms
It was just the Mustache’s — a.k.a Rollie Fingers’ — birthday.
You know it’s a good pitch when even your catcher gets fooled.