”亚当.斯密笑到最后“
2009-02-12 02:43阅读：
”亚当.斯密笑到最后“
如果你对经济学感兴趣，并且期望知道解决经济危机的最佳方案，你需要读英国《金融时报》的这篇专栏。P.J. O’Rourke
在短短的文字里应用亚当.斯密的《国富论》的理论解读了当前这场经济危机的来源以及解决的方案。
经济危机的来源：过度金融交易，造就虚假的资产价值
解决方案：市场自己已经解决，那些炒上去的资产跌下来，已经发生了。
以下是文章的转载，版权归英国《金融时报》
Adam Smith gets the last
laugh
Adam Smith gets the last laugh
By P.J. O’Rourke
Published: February 10 2009 19:22 | Last updated: February 10 2009
19:22
The free market is dead. It was killed by the Bolshevik Revolution,
fascist dirigisme, Keynesianism, the Great Depression, the second
world war economic controls, the Labour party victory of 1945,
Keynesianism again, the Arab oil embargo, Anthony Giddens’s “third
way” and the current financial crisis. The free market has died at
least 10 times in the past century. And whenever the market expires
people want to know wha
t Adam Smith would say. It is a moment of, “Hello, God, how’s my
atheism going?”
Adam Smith would be laughing too hard to say anything. Smith
spotted the precise cause of our economic calamity not just before
it happened but 232 years before – probably a record for going
short.
“A dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of
its inhabitant,” Smith said in
The Wealth of Nations. “If it
is lett [sic] to a tenant for rent, as the house itself can produce
nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other
revenue.” Therefore Smith concluded that, although a house can make
money for its owner if it is rented, “the revenue of the whole body
of the people can never be in the smallest degree increased by it”.
[281]*
Smith was familiar with rampant speculation, or “overtrading” as he
politely called it.
The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea Bubble had both collapsed
in 1720, three years before his birth. In 1772, while Smith was
writing
The Wealth of Nations, a bank run occurred in
Scotland. Only three of Edinburgh’s 30 private banks survived. The
reaction to the ensuing credit freeze from the Scottish overtraders
sounds familiar, “The banks, they seem to have thought,” Smith
said, “were in honour bound to supply the deficiency, and to
provide them with all the capital which they wanted to trade with.”
[308]
The phenomenon of speculative excess has less to do with free
markets than with high profits. “When the profits of trade happen
to be greater than ordinary,” Smith said, “overtrading becomes a
general error.” [438] And rate of profit, Smith claimed, “is always
highest in the countries that are going fastest to ruin”.
[266]
The South Sea Bubble was the result of ruinous machinations by
Britain’s lord treasurer, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, who was
looking to fund the national debt. The Mississippi Scheme was
started by the French regent Philippe duc d’Orléans when he gave
control of the royal bank to the Scottish financier John Law, the
Bernard Madoff of his day.
Law’s fellow Scots – who were more inclined to market freedoms than
the English, let alone the French – had already heard Law’s plan
for “establishing a bank ... which he seems to have imagined might
issue paper to the amount of the whole value of all the lands in
the country”. The parliament of Scotland, Smith noted, “did not
think proper to adopt it”. [317]
One simple idea allows an over-trading folly to turn into a
speculative disaster – whether it involves ocean commerce, land in
Louisiana, stocks, bonds, tulip bulbs or home mortgages. The idea
is that unlimited prosperity can be created by the unlimited
expansion of credit.
Such wild flights of borrowing can be effected only with what Smith
called “the Daedalian wings of paper money”. [321] To produce
enough of this paper requires either a government or something the
size of a government, which modern merchant banks have become. As
Smith pointed out: “The government of an exclusive company of
merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments.” [570]
The idea that
The Wealth of Nations puts forth for creating
prosperity is more complex. It involves all the baffling
intricacies of human liberty. Smith proposed that everyone be free
– free of bondage and of political, economic and regulatory
oppression (Smith’s principle of “self-interest”), free in choice
of employment (Smith’s principle of “division of labour”), and free
to own and exchange the products of that labour (Smith’s principle
of “free trade”). “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the
highest degree of opulence,” Smith told a learned society in
Edinburgh (with what degree of sarcasm we can imagine), “but peace,
easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.”
How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess? Sorry, but it is
fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative
assets is to pay less for them. Job done.
We could pump the banks full of our national treasure. But Smith
said: “To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by
introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold
and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the
good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an
unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.” [440]
We could send in the experts to manage our bail-out. But Smith
said: “I have never known much good done by those who affect to
trade for the public good.” [456]
And we could nationalise our economies. But Smith said: “The state
cannot be very great of which the sovereign has leisure to carry on
the trade of a wine merchant or apothecary”. [818] Or chairman of
General Motors.
* Bracketed numbers in the text refer to pages in ‘The Wealth of
Nations’, Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith, Oxford
University Press, 1976
The writer is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard and
is the author, most recently, of On The Wealth of Nations, Books
That Changed the World, published by Atlantic Books, 2007
Copyright The Financial Times Limited
2009
