That rumbling sound you hear is Adam Smith turning in his grave

Theo Clifford is winner of the 18-21 category of the Adam Smith Institute’s 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition,

You can find an example of his writing on the Institute's blog. It ends:

Sweeping deregulation is the only way to provide Britain with the slums it is crying out for.

Yes, he is being provocative - he might even grow up to offer contrarian opinions to a deadline for money - but it is annoying to see Adam Smith's name associated with childish opinions like this.

Smith was a great and subtle thinker, and those who recruit him as a champion of the modern corporation fundamentally misunderstand him.

Here is Smith criticism of the joint-stock company in his Wealth of Nations:

The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

Recent history suggests he was right.

It is even greater mistake to attach Smith's name to views like Clifford's.

Here are the opening words of The Theory of Moral Sentiments - a book that Smith's modern admirers read even less than Wealth of Nations:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. 

That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

So the young and well-connected should not recruit Adam Smith to champion their own selfishness.

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