Adam Smith and his 'hidden hand' took some stick on FW a week or two ago. However, the notion is wrongly ascribed to him. He only coined the phrase. The Catholic Church of the late medieval period had long come to the view that the "just price" for a good was the market price, so long as there was sufficient competition between sellers. This, like many other ideas in Smith's "Wealth of Nations", was really a restatement in secular terms of a practice that had finally been sanctioned by the Church after many attempts over the centuries to control prices for the sake of the poor. (When this was tried, the suppliers of the goods simply decamped and went elsewhere, so the poor were worse off. This is similar to attempts by governments and councils to help the poor in more recent times by controlling house rents. When this happens, landlords sell up.) Adam Smith's book was more of a (best-selling) compendium of the many pamphlets that had been published in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. (Joyce Appleby: "Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England", Princeton University Press, 1978)
Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
