On Aug 17, 2010, at 12:21 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> The concrete content of "country," as always, remains ambiguous. As does
> the meaning of "ruin" when applied to nations. Who or what gets ruined?
More from the same Smith passage:
> The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [i.e, the capitalist class], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
Could you imagine a bourgeois economist saying something like this today?
Doug