These days, when anyone calls for higher taxation of the rich and programs of uplift for the poor, they are accused of Marxism by MAGA loyalists. It appears most MAGA enthusiasts have never read a page of Marx and have no idea what socialism is. I suspect few of them have read Adam Smith either. If Adam Smith were alive today, he himself might be accused of Marxism.
Capitalism was originally an organizing economic principle within humanist values. Adam Smith wanted to find leverage to dismantle feudalism so he used property rights for leverage; but Smith operated with an assumption that persons are the context of things, not things the context of persons. Adam Smith’s writings contain many warning labels about the dangers of his own property based economic system.
SMITH WARNED THAT A SYSTEM BASED ON PROPERTY RIGHTS LEFT UNATTENDED WOULD DRIFT TOWARD WEALTH INEQUITY:
“Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich (person) there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.”
SMITH WARNED THAT HIGH PROFITS COULD LEAD TO LOW WAGES:
“Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
SMITH WARNED OF GOVERNMENT STACKED TOWARD THE RICH:
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
SMITH BELIEVED THE RICH SHOULD PAY MORE TAXES:
“It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
WHILE SMITH WAS PROPOSING THE SYSTEM WE NOW CALL CAPITALISM, HIS WORK IS REPLETE WITH WARNING LABELS NOW DISREGARDED:
“To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers… It comes from an order of (human beings) whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
Capitalism cannot by itself lead to economic justice because it is a system. Underneath any economic system needs to beat a human heart that, like Adam Smith’s, sides with propertyless human beings over and against inhumane concentrations of wealth and power even those resulting from his own system.