Posted on 09/30/2023 11:09:53 AM PDT by DallasBiff
The Wealth of Nations, in full An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, work by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, first published in 1776, that became a foundational study in the history of economics and the first formulation of a comprehensive system of political economy.
Despite its renown as the first great work of political economy, The Wealth of Nations is in fact a continuation of a philosophical theme begun in an earlier work by Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). The ultimate problem to which Smith addresses himself is how the struggle between what he calls the “inner man” (the capacity of individuals to impartially approve or condemn their own and others’ actions with a voice impossible to disregard) and individuals’ passions for self-preservation and self-interest works its effects in the larger arena of history, both in the long-run evolution of society and in terms of the immediate characteristics of the stage of history typical of Smith’s own day.
(Excerpt) Read more at britannica.com ...
This should be required reading in all public schools.
While the wealth of nations is mostly wise free market economics, free trade destroys national industries critical to nations. Adam Smith was a globalist and best friend of David Hume.
I’m currently reading this book in my 40’s. I couldn’t imagine reading it when I was a teenager in high school.
Adam Smith acknowledged four exceptions to his otherwise strong advocacy of free trade: (1) national security; (2) ensuring that imports are taxed by the home government no less than the home government taxes domestically produced goods and services that compete with imports; (3) pressuring foreign governments to reduce their tariffs; and (4) ensuring that workers in protected industries are not all hit suddenly and unexpectedly with the need to find new jobs.
https://www.aier.org/article/adam-smiths-alleged-exceptions-to-a-policy-of-unilateral-free-trade/
It’s in the top ten books to include in my 5,000 project.
There’s only room for about 30,000 more books, get your preferences in early...
Funny you should bring that up - reading it now. Pretty-much up-to-date for something written over 250 years ago, it has aged well.
This is a free ebook available in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg
Have you checked out Project Gutenberg?
Recently Mexico surpassed China as our #1 partner of legal product and services. And we imagine what their rank is with illegal product and services.
Biden is financing Putin’s war by creating high energy prices.
We must first understand Capitalism, and small and big limits we put on “pure capitalism”.
Both on the left and righ few understand economics... a failure of our school system.
Oh yes. I can pick 30K books at random.
Which books would be best for rebooting the best of our civilization?
The first 70K books here might not be a bad start...
https://www.zeugmaweb.net/PG/Gutenberg-all.txt
This has a link to zipped bundles of 1000 books.
Note: all together it is 100GB of books as drm-free epubs.
https://www.zeugmaweb.net/PG/
Aesop’s Fables must be one of them.
YES! Thanks!
Yes, but which ones? Seems very heavy on fiction, pretty lean on technology, about right on governance (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc.) about right on Greek philosophers. No primers, no picture dictionaries.
What to exclude? I note the Communist Manifesto included and Mein Kampf is missing, I’d probably give both a pass.
You always start with the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica, according to all the best science fiction. The you go with philosophy, economics, and any technical manuals you can find. the 1910 EB takes you all the way up to Maxwell, from a scientific standpoint. If you’re actually serious about this, I’d recommend reading the first 3 books of the series “1632” series. The first one is available free from the publisher. The author and a lot of folk put in a lot of thought about how you ‘jump start’ civilization. If you have them, the “Grantville Gazettes” that are also a part of that series are half fiction, and half fact. Everything from mining techniques and considerations, to animal husbandry.
I am quite serious, to the patent pending stage.
The target audience is something near Rome, Greece, Egypt level of civilization, bronze or early iron age, far enough along to have the concept of reading and writing.
There are pictographic instructions for using the provided can openers to open the subpackages, everything in the packages are human readable, includes sounding boards for all 44 phonemes in the English language, large print text primer and starter pack, and microscopes for reading smaller text.
The goal is to have hundreds to thousands of these archives scattered widely.
Compare to Arch Foundation which has one archive on the moon and one in a lava tube, or Microsoft Silica which has a few archives both systems require sophisticated technology to read in any detail. MS says anyone with a femtosecond laser can figure out how to read the deeply encoded bits (phase, angle, depth, polarization, retardence) and decrypt the bits into bytes and break the encoding systems used. Right.
Besides, if they’ve got all that, why do they need guidance on any of the foundational things; smelting metals, horse collar and plow, crop rotation, soap and sanitation, law and justice, art and culture, the scientific method, little things like that...
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