Not only the prejudices of the publick, but what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it.Spies and conspirators have used invisible inks for millennia to send messages. He wrote, “To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it. Smith promoted free trade, but he never anticipated that it would be achieved. “If a nation could not prosper without the enjoyment of perfect liberty and perfect justice, there is not in the world a nation which could ever have prospered.” Smith also specifically refuted the notion that market-based prosperity required perfection. The division of labour, he stressed, had come about as the “consequence of a certain propensity in human nature…to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” It was a “propensity,” not an exercise in unbridled rationality. He also pointed out that the business of the market was achieved by a rough “higgling and bargaining” and continued despite the “folly and impertinence” of government policy.
Smith was, in fact, in Moral Sentiments, a keen analyst of human irrationality. One prevalent but bogus critique is that the validity of the Hand depends on the (naïve) belief that economic actors are rational and markets are perfect. Here is the Invisible Hand in all its productive but taken-for-granted glory. “Without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands,” wrote Smith, “the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated.” Producing the rest of the workman’s attire, and his tools, home, furniture and utensils, similarly required vast interconnected industries. To accommodate the labourer’s simple needs, Smith observed, required an amount of cooperation that “exceeds all computation.” Smith took as his prime example the labourer’s plain woollen coat, which, “as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.” Smith enumerated all the parts of the wool industry, all the merchants and carriers, all the elaborate machinery-from ships and mills to looms and furnaces-that would have been involved. Smith’s most important indirect reference lies in his example of how the market provides for even the most humble labourer.
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