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“They’re providing housing!”
No. Construction, maintenance and infrastructure workers, planners and credit unions are, landlords merely fill the organisational power vacuum that cooperative or social housing would fill. Owning isn’t labour.
Wealth of Nations is surprisingly left-wing when you actually read it. Smith would probably be something like a social democrat if he were alive today.
A lot of it is “We don’t need top-down aristocratic control because people can order their own affairs; watch me describe how people make perfectly cooperative market transactions even though businessmen are conspiratorial shits”, and somehow now ‘capitalists’ who haven’t read it think it’s “CAPITALISM MEANS ARISTOCRACY IS GOOD, ACTUALLY”
I guess there are always defenders of the aristocracy, in every age, no matter what form it takes or what name it claims.
He even talks about how government itself was built to protect the rich from the poor. It’s practically Marx verbatim.
Marx even openly credits Smith with doing important work in the field, albeit in a “He was SO close, but just missed the most essential point of all” kind of way, and freely quoted him.
Almost like Marx was an academic operating with the thinking of an academic - that new thought is built upon previous discoveries - instead of the weird tribalist ‘My scripture GOOD, their scripture BAD’ stuff people want to engage in.
Well, Marx drew more from Ricardo who was himself building upon Smith’s work, but yes they were certainly part of the same continuum that arguably runs today through people like Graeber (pbuh) and Piketty.
