ECON-100 FA4 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Consumer Sovereignty, Invisible Hand, Kate Moss
12 Oct 2016
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Putting reason first and foremost- it"s what we should trust. The world would take care of itself if it wasn"t for superstition. Adam smith was taking issue with the fact that government tried to intervene with economy to try and make the economy work better. Government only gives monopolies to the powerful. Bernard de mandeville"s book fables of the bee. People should be free to follow their self-interest because private vice can then be turned to public virtue. We do not get chaos because the invisible hand controls everything. Consumer sovereignty- consumers decide what should be produced, not the government, and the producers respond to this. If you let consumers consume what they want and let producers respond to this, you can keep all the corruption that follows the government out of your market place. Those robber barons are just responding to what the markets wanted. This goes completely against what the church used to teach.
