THE GUILDED HORSE

At what point does ownership cease to finance production and begin to stand between the producer and the produce?

The question is not mine. It belongs to Adam Smith, though he never phrased it in those words. It is the question that runs beneath The Wealth of Nations from the first chapters of Book I to the long, wearying chapters on colonies and public debt in Book V. Smith did not ask it as a rhetorician. He asked it as a moral philosopher who had spent a decade thinking about sympathy, justice, and the conditions under which self-interest could be trusted to serve anyone but the self.