The Policy of Europe
January has felt like a very GOP month, thus far: I’ve been reading The Wealth of Nations and the KJV. I feel a little dirty Of course, while neither Moses nor Adam Smith was politically radical by today’s standards, it’s important to remain aware of the fact that these texts are essentially being appropriated by today’s American conservatives. (I somehow doubt that that bleeding heart Jesus would be behind Bushian tax cuts… What did he say, again? Give unto Washington that which is Washington’s?) Neo-cons wouldn’t dig Smith’s economics, and he wouldn’t approve of their brand of interventionism.
For example, in Book I, succinctly titled ‘Of the causes of improvement in the productive powers of labour, and of the order according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks of people’, Smith dedicates a chapter to inequalities in wages of labour and costs of stock. He makes a curious division between ‘inequalities arising from the nature of the employments themselves’ and ‘inequalities occasioned by the policy of Europe.’ The ontological status of ‘nature’ in Smith’s concepts of natural prices, wages, rents, &c. may and should be debated — I tend to agree with Mauss that homo œconomicus (a term which Smith did not use, but which applies well to his understanding of human economic decision-making) has never existed. I’d like to skip past the critique of Smith, for a moment, though, to the third of Europe’s policies that has a deleterious effect on equality of wages and prices:
…The policy of Europe, by obstructing the free circulation of labour and stock both from employment to employment, and from place to place, occasions in some cases a very inconvenient inequality in the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of their different employments.
Bantam Classics, p. 185
The first sort of obstruction discussed by Smith consists in guild and corporation restrictions, but the greater part of the section deals with geographic restrictions, focusing on England’s ‘poor laws’ which restricted the movement of labour from one part of the Kingdom to another.
In most countries in the 21st century, citizens are permitted to move freely from one state, province, or city to another. It seems unlikely that Smith would have foreseen the sort of mass movement of labour that we see today, say, over the US-Mexican border: ‘After all that has been said of the levity and inconstancy of human nature, it appears evidently from experience that a man is of all sorts of luggage the most difficult to be transported.’ (p. 106) (I may well revise my view of Smith’s view of labour’s motility after finishing Book IV, which deals with Europe’s colonies.) Nevertheless, his reasoning applies equally well internationally, and the suggestion seems implicit. As an individual, his opinion might change with awareness of current conditions, but if his philosophy was right in 1776, it’s right now.
Despite Bush’s recent support for a temporary-worker program, Neo-Cons generally loathe such ideas, and palaeo-conservatives aren’t much more receptive. The Democrats in general certainly have no special interest in open borders. Neither conservatives nor liberals will have anything to do with this sort of stuff: This is the domain of radicals — folks like the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.
Yep.