Adam Smith held labor as something sacred and the core of all societies. If he lived today, he would be against Free Trade and Globalization as it is practiced. Today workers are the main commodities being traded. Workers are put on a global trading block to compete with one another down to the lowest levels of wage slave and even child labor. Smith would tell Free Traders not to use his name as a tool for their counterfeit free markets. He would have rejected the greed, power and money that drives Free Trade. He was really a Populist who challenged both capitalists and colonialists to conduct business for the good of all. Free Trade has narrowed competition to elite groupings and vast-trans national corporations. It has closed the door to fair trade.
The industrial revolution and capitalism did not exist in its modern form when Adam Smith lived. He was not a supporter of "laissez-faire" practices in the transaction of business and never even used the term. Farming and mercantile enterprises were the main business pursuits of his time. Manufacturing and production as we know it were something coming in the future. Free Trade is based on moving production and factories from place to place base on the cheapest labor markets of the world. Smith believed the opposite as far as wages are concerned. He believed that better wages improved the capacity of workers who are encouraged by enjoying the fruits of their work to the utmost. He still would have been against government controlling the flow of business but at the same time he would have confronted those who live off the suffering of workers. He would point to the government's part in business as the result of the free enterprise system failing its mission to serve the whole of any society.
Smith did say "self interests" were the roots of good enterprises but meant it in a different way as it is defined today. His most famous statement was "It is not the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from the regard to their own interest" - On the other side of the coin , he believed selfish "private interests" led to the "spirit of monopoly" which is obviously happening today in the global economic arena. There is nothing really free about it especially when workers have no voice in the process and are at the bottom of any discussion about Globalization and Free Trade. Protestors are put down fast while meetings of the elite groupings take place. The elite groups from governments, vast-transnational corporations and economists who are far from the real world work day, all meet to set the markets according to their wills. They concentrate on production and investment and ignore the workers. In a weird way, Capitalism and Communism have locked hands in the degradation of human dignity in the work day.
Unemployment rates in the U.S. and other major countries are fabricated to cover the most massive dislocation of workers in history. The U.S. prison population keeps breaking records and only about 40% of all workers qualify for unemployment insurance. This demonstrates the vast voids in the reporting of unemployment. The term underemployment which was once used to cover workers who could not find a full time job has now faded away. A person making only a $100 a month is now considered employed. At the same time, governments keep reporting statistical prosperity while economic decay is obviously all around us. Franklin Roosevelt said economic diseases are highly communicable. Today these disease are an epidemic seemingly out of control. An economic virus has infected the world. A new kind of colonialism has been bred. Nations find they must control their interests worldwide. This causes terrorism and wars.
If Adam Smith was alive today, he would be promoting a book by John Perkins titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. This book tells all about the money manipulations by our government saddling third world countries with debts they will never be able to pay. All who are interested in Social Justice and Distributive Justice should read this book instead of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Distributive Justice calls for all parts of any society and economy to serve what is best for the whole of any society and not strip human dignity out of it in the workday. See Tapart News and Art that Talks at http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews
See our other ezine article Lend Lease was Real Free Trade and not chopped liver as in the Globalist World pointing to the fact you can not do business with people who do not have money at http://ezinearticles.com/?id=390710 and Flip the Flat World over and see what you get. It is not pretty at http://tapsearch.com/flipflatworld/