TRYTOSEE INTOTHEFUTURE
and the attitudes of the political and financial elites who shape that policy. Smith said, “The banks, they seem to have thought were in honour bound to supply the deficiency, and to provide them with all the capital which they wanted to trade with.” Smith also gave us a warning of what would happen to “the Daedalian wings of paper money” if it became fiat currency untethered to any measure of value. In Greek myth, Daedalus makes a pair of wax and feather wings for his son Icarus. Icarus flies too high. The sun melts the wax. And Icarus takes a plunge like the Venezuelan bolivar. Smith is sometimes faulted for not predicting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution. He didn’t predict them because he knew they were already happening. “The productive powers of labourers,” Smith said, “cannot be increased, but in consequence either of some addition and improvement to those machines and instruments which facilitate and abridge
perhaps, but a genius nonetheless. And he made a number of very accurate predictions
about socioeconomic innovations. He was wrong about the triumph of
communism, obviously. But communism was just some harebrained scheme. Marx’s prophesies are another matter. They’re almost eerie. In The Communist Manifesto , published in 1848, Marx made the right call on: • Disappearance of the middle class . Read all about it in every news outlet. • Confiscation of bourgeois property . The Environmental Protection Agency called. • Heavy taxation . So did the IRS. • Liberation of women . Done. • Dissolution of the nuclear family . Check. • Working without material incentive . “The sharing economy.” • Free public education . And worth it. • Centralization of banking and credit in the hands of the state . Were you invited to the last Fed meeting?
• Combination of agriculture with manufacturing . Chicken fingers.
labour.” Smith was friends with the inventor of the steam engine, James Watt. KARL MARX (1818-1883) was a genius, too. An evil genius,
• The proletariat becomes the ruling class . Well, President Trump is not exactly a proletarian, but he’s not exactly “high class” either.
American Consequences | 67
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