• AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    If you read the entirety of both Wealth of Nations, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I believe that you’ll find that pulling the segment of “like all other men” out of the original quote reflects the sentiments of Mr. Smith correctly. He used that phrase to mean all other men of capital, not the entirety of the human species. He spells that out in his previous work “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” but to leave the quote unabridged allows for bad faith arguments against the spirit of the author’s self proclaimed intentions of artificially and quickly expanding wealth so that the nations could work together to create utopia eventually. Adam never intended us to stick with capitalism after the late 1800s by his own benchmarks in both volumes.