Philosophers From Scotland

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

"Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness."

"Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties; and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it."

"The tolls for the maintenance of a high road, cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons."

"The Hudson's Bay Company, before their misfortunes in the late war, had been much more fortunate than the Royal African Company."

"That a joint stock company should be able to carry on successfully any branch of foreign trade, when private adventurers can come into any sort of open and fair competition with them, seems contrary to all experience."

"The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."

"Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from these rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it."

"The trade of insurance gives great security to the fortunes of private people, and by dividing among a great many that loss which would ruin an individual, makes it fall light and easy upon the whole society."

"In England, success in the profession of the law leads to some very great objects of ambition; and yet how few men, born to easy fortunes, have ever in this country been eminent in that profession?"

"The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more than that of people of some rank and fortune."

"For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education."

"Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency."

"Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune."

"It is unjust that the whole of society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society."

"Lands for the purposes of pleasure and magnificence, parks, gardens, public walks, &c. possessions which are every where considered as causes of expence, not as sources of revenue, seem to be the only lands which, in a great and civilized monarchy, ought to belong the crown."

"I. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities, that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state."

"II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary."

"III. Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it."

"IV. Every tax ought to be contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state."

"The evident justice and utility of the foregoing maxims have recommended them more or less to the attention of all nations."

"But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality."

"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. 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."

"Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master."

"There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people."

"All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist."

"It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet."

"If a workman can conveniently spare those three halfpence, he buys a pot of porter. If he cannot, he contents himself with a pint, and, as a penny saved is a penny got, he thus gains a farthing by his temperance."

"That of beaver skins, of beaver wool, and of gum Senega, has been subjected to higher duties; Great Britain, by the conquest of Canada and Senegal, having got almost the monopoly of those commodities."

"The value of money is in proportion to the quantity of the necessaries of life which it will purchase."

"But bounty and hospitality very seldom lead to extravagance; though vanity almost always does."

"When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretend payment."

"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."

"We are forced, in equity, to share the government with the working class by considerations which were made supreme by the awakening of political economy. Adam Smith set up two propositions—that contracts ought to be free between capital and labour, and that labour is the source, he sometimes says the only source, of wealth. If the last sentence, in its exclusive form, was true, it was difficult to resist the conclusion that the class on which national prosperity depends ought to control the wealth it supplies, that is, ought to govern instead of the useless unproductive class, and that the class which earns the increment ought to enjoy it. That is the foreign effect of Adam Smith—French Revolution and Socialism."

"[The Wealth of Nations gave a] scientific backbone to liberal sentiment."

"Mr. Burke talked in very high terms of Dr. Adam Smith; praised the clearness and depth of his understanding, his profound and extensive learning, and the vast accession that had accrued to British literature and philosophy from these exertions, and described his heart as being equally good with his head and his manners as peculiarly pleasing. Mr. Smith, he said, told him, after they had conversed on subjects of political economy, that he was the only man, who, without communication, thought on these topics exactly as he did."

"Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made."

"[T]he simple fact is, of course, that in normal trade all parties gain; there exist mutual gains from trade. The great contribution of Adam Smith lay in his popularization of this simple point, but the full import of this conception for democratic political theory does not seem to have yet been appreciated."

"An excellent digest of all that is valuable in former Oeconomical writers with many valuable corrective Observations."

"I had by then re-read Wealth of Nations and, equally important, its companion volume, Theory of Moral Sentiments, and had begun to realize the enormity of the con trick which the Adam Smith Institute was seeking to play on the unsuspecting British people, now being dazzled by the self-certainties of the counter-revolutionaries. I had been put on to his track by my old friend Harold Lever... he expounded to me one of his favourite themes: Adam Smith was the most misquoted writer in history. Those who distorted his message for their own ends had never read him properly. Harold then juxtaposed two quotations: the first being the famous one in which Adam Smith declares that politicians mislead themselves when they imagine they can arrange the "different members of a great society" like pieces on a chess board to do their economic will. They will follow their own motivations – self-interest and self-love... But Harold's second quotation put a different light on things. "Government has a duty", Smith wrote, "of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions" vital to the running of "a great society", which would never be provided by individuals because "the profit would never repay the expense to an individual"."

"True, Smith was a firm believer in the market economy, but he was not a doctrinaire advocate of laissez-faire. His ideas for the role of government were obviously limited by the stage of development reached in the eighteenth century, when the state's activities comprised mainly defence, maintenance of the rule of law and the provision and construction of a transport system of roads, bridges and canals. But in one field he was prepared for the government to intervene to the point of being dictatorial – education. This sprang from his recognition of the social costs of the market economy. The growing phenomenon of the division of labour led, he maintained, to the mental mutilation of those condemned to spend their working lives on a few simple and repetitive operations, which bred "torpor of the mind". And he added, "In every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it." The discovery of these words came like a breath of fresh mountain air. This was William Morris and Ruskin all over again. Why were we socialists allowing the Thatcherites to disguise and distort these revelations of the dangers and inadequacies of the market economy? We were the real custodians of the "great society"."

"He's pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits."

"About this time two others, men of great talents and learning, promoted the cause of the injured Africans, by the manner in which they introduced them to notice in their respective works. Dr. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, had, so early as the year 1759, held them up in an honourable, and their tyrants in a degrading light. "There is not a Negro from the coast of Africa, who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the gaols of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtue neither of the countries they came from, nor of those they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished." And now, in 1776, in his Wealth of Nations he showed in a forcible manner (for he appealed to the interest of those concerned,) the dearness of African labour; or the impolicy of employing slaves."

"If I were five-and-twenty or thirty, instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would take Adam Smith in hand—I would not go beyond him, I would have no politics in it—I would take Adam Smith in hand, and I would have a League for free trade in Land just as we had a League for free trade in Corn. You will find just the same authority in Adam Smith for the one as for the other; and if it were only taken up as it must be taken up to succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical, Chartist notion, but taken up on politico-economic grounds, the agitation would be certain to succeed; and if you apply free trade in land and to labour too—that is, by getting rid of those abominable restrictions in your parish settlements, and the like—then, I say, the men who do that will have done for England probably more than we have been able to do by making free trade in corn."

"Adam Smith, had treated forestalling as an imaginary evil! Adam Smith, whom I knew well, was a man of investigation, knowledge, and sagacity; with a heart overflowing with benevolence and sociability; but he was strong tinctured with French Philosophy and systime! To mention two circumstances, in which I cannot be mistaken, because spoken to myself, and although contradictory to the sentiments that I had expressed, not spoken in publick, where men often sport opinions for argument, but in the familiarity of individual conversation, where the unreserved sentiments are spoke. These were "That the Christian Religion debased the human mind;" and that "Sodomy was a thing in itself indifferent." The considerate part of mankind will think that the opinions of such a man, or of any man, are not to be admitted as infallible dogmas; but to be fairly weighed, before they are adopted."

"I have found one just man in Gomorrah—Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations. He was the Duke of Buccleuch's tutor, is a wise and deep philosopher, and although made commissioner of the customs here by the Duke and Lord Advocate, is what I call an honest fellow. He wrote a most kind as well as elegant letter to Burke on his resignation, as I believe I told you before; and on my mentioning it to him, he told me he was the only man here who spoke out for the Rockinghams."

"The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another."

"The greatest of Scotchmen was the first economist, Adam Smith."

"What an excellent work is that with which our common friend, Mr Adam Smith, has enriched the public!—an extensive science in a single book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language."

"Now, sir, I stand here in the land where Adam Smith was born, the parent and patriarch of political economy—the man who first taught us that in our intercourse with other nations, as well as among ourselves, it was better to have our hands free than to have our hands and arms in manacles—who taught the great doctrines of Free Trade, and who has imbued the world with these doctrines."