Adam Smith's warning about a Race to the Bottom

In Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith warned about cronies taking over countries and putting people through hell:

--------

   To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

--------

The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI, Conclusion of the Chapter, p.267, para. 10. [drawn from the web at: www.adamsmith.org/adam-smith-quotes/]

When he mentions "an order of men" who are both willing and often even able "to deceive and even oppress the public" he is talking about cronies, whether they are completely outside of government or embedded inside of government as civil servants.

In 1949, Ludwig von Mises (Laissez Faire or Dictatorship essay) wrote about how the British Fabian Society was little more than greedy government civil servants engaged in rent-seeking behavior. A relevant quote he made about their mindset was this:

--------

... every measure that makes government's payroll swell is progress.

--------

By 1949, the Fabians had become what Adam Smith warned about: deceivers and oppressors, acting from the inside to grow government at the expense of the individual. 

Public Choice Theory (eg. the work of James Buchanan) would later analyze how public systems of self-interested maximizers always detract from a nation's general welfare -- just as Adam Smith had warned they would.

In 2020, big businesses acted in their narrow self-interest by supporting the candidate most likely to implement an unjust and unconstitutional patronage system in the US -- donating twice as much to the Biden campaign as to Trump.

It looks as if nothing has changed in the 244 years since Adam Smith warned that government insiders would do this to us, progressively restricting our freedom and wealth, while racheting up corruption and deception each year.

Image Attribution

Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AdamSmith.jpg

Attribution: Etching created by Cadell and Davies (1811), John Horsburgh (1828) or R.C. Bell (1872)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons