Drum is challenging readers to come up with a Top 10 list of most balefully influential conservative books, started by his earlier post about an anti-liberal Top 10 compiled by Human Events.
I repeat, again cheating by dipping back into the 1700s, though by Kevin’s latest call, interpreted to look back 200 years prior to 1970, it's not cheating, to nominate:
The Wealth of Nations.
Its influence? Unquestionably vast.
The strength of its philosophical or empirical foundation? Weak, though Kevin, in his continued idolatry of the accuracy of "the invisible hand," continues to disagree.
Let me unpack the details of how Wealth of Nations is wrong.
First, the philosophy its based on, Enlightenment Deism, with its mechanical-minded, omniscient, omnipotent Deity is so out of date, and just plain wrong (unless you’re William Dembski or Michael Behe resurrecting this zombie as the stalking horse for the not-to-be-called-Christian Designer) its almost laughable.
Specifically, on the grounds of physics, the Deist Artificer was killed dead through the heart by one Max Planck in 1900, with followup by Erwin Schroedinger, P.A.M. Dirac, and above all, Werner Heisenberg. Einstein both recognized the metaphysical stakes of quantum theory and refused to accept them with his “The Old One does not play dice” comment.
Well, “Old One” or not, we’re in a fuzzy, indeterminate, dice-playing universe, as further exemplified by the burgeoning fields of complexity theory and chaos theory, among other things. (Side note: some of the most vociferous defenders of neo-Darwinism, such as Dennett and Dawkins, fail to have read this note, as well. That's not to say the core of neo-Darwinism isn’t true, just that there’s a lot more contingency in macrobiology than they'll admit.)
Second, Smith, like many though not all British empiricists, believed in "”the moral sense.” This is in a literal sense. Starting with Locke, many British philosophers of the 1700s believed we had a literal moral sense in our mental toolkit.
Well, not too long after Smith died, the French Revolution, which killed many of the continential Deist philosophes, dinged that theory pretty badly. World War II certainly killed both it, and the concomitant Deist idea that this is “the best of all possible worlds,” as Leibnitz first claimed.
Falling by the wayside along with that is the contention of many American business conservatives that economic self-interest, as expressed through classical liberal capitalist greed, is somehow moral.
Third, since I’ve mentioned empiricism, let's note that a number of Nobel Prizes in Economics in the last 15 years have been awarded to economists who have specifically, and in detail, through both sociological research and neuroscience study, shown just how irrational many of our economic decisions are.
Three strikes and your Wealth of Nations is OUT, Mr. Smith.
It has been as influential, and I will seriously argue at least half as baleful on the behalf of liberal capitalism, and specifically Anglo-American liberal capitalism (Exhibit 1: World Bank; Exhibit 2: International Monetary Fund) as Marx's Manifesto or Capital.
Now, if people like Kevin would recognize it (or else drop the “liberal” and instead identify themselves as “moderate” or “centrist” we'd make a bit of progress on progressive economics.
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