“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
-Literally Adam Smith. I dont even need to get out the Mao quotes.
The problem isn’t the scale the problem is the class dynamic.
Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.
Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.
It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
-Literally Adam Smith. I dont even need to get out the Mao quotes.
The problem isn’t the scale the problem is the class dynamic.
Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.
Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.
It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.