~ Librarian's Note ~

Did you know that Adam Smith advocated for a Universal Basic Income?  That's right.  Adam Smith is probably the second most commonly misunderstood and misrepresented public intellectual after only Karl Marx himself, who in fact developed many of the ideas presented by The Communist Manifesto (such as free public schools) building on foundational concepts introduced the prior century by Adam Smith.  

Had Adam Smith been born in the 20th Century, McCarthy would have had him hauled him before congress as a suspected Communist, and Hoover would have had his phone tapped.  

Far from the evangelist for shareholder capitalism today's wall street aristocracy would have you believe, he was in fact one of its first, and fiercest critics, analyzing its functions and interactions as a physician would study a disease. 

Further, he emphasizes the inherent power of labor to organize and immunize the people from the brutish symptoms of capitalism's inherent amorality, such as the rape of natural resource wealth and the enslavement and oppression of large groups of people to serve the whims of a very few elite aristocrats, much as how Amazon laborers today often urinate in cups at work for want of breaks to rest and 8-year-olds in the Congo toil day and night in Cobalt mines so that robber baron Jeffery Bezos can impulse purchase a second, then a third private yacht, or so Count Elon may shoot a car worth three of his worker's pay for an entire year into space, at the expense of 1,000 years more in the wages of those who made it for him.  Wouldn’t you agree?  

Adam Smith would likely see such hubris as the buffoonery  of megalomaniacal imbeciles, and further that the growing population trend of such men being a threat to the entire human species, as certainly his protege Karl Marx, not to mention the more admirable of his enlightenment-era contemporaries such as Benjamin Franklin, would as well, no doubt.

/s/

~ mancierge

Curator, RFKLibrary.org