Charles Jesse Bullock

“ Since economists of this school had maintained that perfect liberty is the only policy that can raise this annual produce to a maximum, Smith considered their doctrines "the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy." ”

“ Even here he merely indicates that he considers the annual income of a society as its real wealth: whereas most economists prior to his time had conceived wealth as the accumulated stock of durable goods which a society possesses. ”

“ All these employments are useful; but a country with insufficient capital to engage in all of them will increase in opulence most rapidly if it employs its capital in agriculture first of all, then engages in manufactures and the home trade, and refrains from entering upon foreign commerce and the carrying trade until the natural increase of capital makes such a course advantageous. ”

“ The first book studies the process by which wealth is produced and then distributed among laborers, entrepreneurs, and landlords. It lays down the doctrine that the increased productivity of the industry of modern societies is due to division of labor. The discussion of this subject is an economic classic, and the reader should observe that Smith finds here an illustration of his cardinal doctrine that it is self-interest, not the action of government, that has brought about the improvement of economic conditions. ”

“ Of these laws the chief seems to be that Providence has commended the welfare of every man chiefly to his own keeping, not to that of others; and has so ordered things that men, in pursuing their own welfare within the limits set by justice, are ordinarily contributing to the general welfare. ”

“ This work presented the doctrine that the moral judgment is, in the last analysis, an expression of impartial sympathy with the motives and result of human action. From sympathy Smith derives the sense of justice, which is "the main pillar of the social structure." Underlying the book is the common eighteenth-century theory of a beneficent natural order, by which it was held that a benevolent Creator had so ordered the universe as to produce the greatest possible human happiness. ”

“ Again Smith commences the treatise without offering a definition of political economy, and the nearest approach to such a definition is found in the first sentence of the fourth book: "Political economy, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to supply a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or, more properly, to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves ”