Jacob Soll > Quotes

“Around the same time that Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency, the TV evangelicals Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell joined the libertarian, far-right wing of the Republican Party. They called for free markets and cited Hayek and Friedman to protest government bureaucrats, while also issuing daily denunciations of rock music, homosexuals, abortion, civil rights, and pornography. Hard-right evangelicals were among the most influential leaders of the new free-market movement. The Republican Party became an ideological mix of the mainline northeastern establishment, American Baptist puritanism, racism and bigotry, and a Friedmanesque and American Southwest individualist libertarianism and permissiveness—all held together by a near-religious reverence for the multinational conglomerate firm and the sanctity of capital-holding shareholders.”
― Jacob Soll, Free Market: The History of an Idea

“Smith’s concept of the mercantile system evolved—completely out of context—into the modern concept of mercantilism: a simplistic, blanket economic term used to characterize early modern economic thinkers as proponents of an interventionist, taxing, subsidizing, and warring state whose goal was to simply hoard gold. In 1931, the Swedish economic historian Eli Heckscher, in his monumental study Mercantilism, juxtaposed Colbert’s “mercantile” economics with a pure, laissez-faire system, which he felt Smith embodied, that allowed for individual and commercial freedoms without state intervention. A powerful and simplistic binary continued thereafter, one that informs our own vision of the free market today. We can see it still in Friedman’s work.”
― Jacob Soll, Free Market: The History of an Idea

“...the idea that Smith can somehow be seen as representative of modern capitalism is a stretch. He was a man of his time, in the very particular society of oligarchic, 18th century Scotland. It was a world in which he thrived precisely by not fighting the status quo, but rather by making a proposal for harnessing greed, while keeping merchants in their social place and celebrating the ruling class of the time, and trying to envision a way in which it could play a part in a modernizing economy. In many ways, he got it right. While capitalism flourished in 18th century Scotland, the landed elite remained firmly in place and has managed to do so to this very day. In that aspect, Smith was quite visionary.”
― Jacob Soll, Adam Smith: The Kirkcaldy Papers

“Today, Adam Smith is famous as the father of capitalism and an advocate of a central tenet of free market thought: that greed is supposedly good and it drives markets. This was an idea pushed by neoliberal economists, inspired by Friedrich Hayeck and Milton Friedman, who had no knowledge of the history of moral philosophy, or of Scotland. What they missed is that no gentleman of his time could ever espouse greed, least of all a professor of moral philosophy. Indeed, Adam Smith recognized greed as an economic driver, and saw it as necessary, but also realized that it was a problem for society. His work was not an espousal of greed, but rather a response to it. His work was an attempt to find a way to reign in commercial greed to support the agrarian order, which he believed to be inherently more productive than business.”
― Jacob Soll, Adam Smith: The Kirkcaldy Papers