Sometimes Adam Smith's invisible hand feels like capitalism's middle fingerused to justify some of the business world's most despicable acts.
Smith, who is to capitalism what Karl Marx is to communism, is often said to have written that an invisible hand would ensure the common good if we just allow individuals to pursue their self-interest in a free market.
Got a problem with ruthless profiteers, reckless bankers, self-dealing corporate executives, waste-dumping entrepreneurs and all their misanthropy? Talk to the invisible hand.
Want justice or appropriate regulation after someone swallowed your nest egg? How 'bout we just shove the ol' invisible hand in your face instead?
"Part of my battle is to correct the caricature of Smith as this gung-ho, laissez-faire individual," said Christopher Berry. "His thought is much more careful and subtle than that."
Smith, after all, was a moral philosopher. And the invisible hand? Just a metaphor, people.
Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations," but he also wrote "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." He defended self-interest as noble, but he also applauded benevolence. Smith didn't view the business arena as divorced from the realm of humanity in which we owe one another moral obligations.
I called Berry because I think he is as close as I can come to interviewing Smith, who lived from 1723 to 1790.
Berry is a professor of political theory at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. More than two centuries ago, Smith was professor of moral philosophy at the same school.
This is where Smith created the road map for us to evolve from oppressive feudal, agrarian economies to today's amazing free-market world.
He's Scotland's greatest export — invisible hands down.
Smith taught that the wealth of a nation stemmed from personal liberty. (Hurray for free markets.)
He also taught that it stemmed from the moral and material well-being of its citizens. (Hurray for the people.)
He also said commerce cannot be allowed to threaten the liberty and well-being of the people. (Hurray for appropriate regulation.)
The economy serves humanity, not the other way around. Even a highly specialized economy that sticks millions of people into really boring jobs.
Smith allows that the specialized mass production of, say, pins may require that some poor slob has to sharpen 48,000 pins a day.
"This division of labor makes for great productivity," Berry said. "But Smith recognized that if you simply sharpened pins all day, you would become mentally dead. He calls it 'mental mutilation.' "
This is why it's imperative for government, society and business to provide education and advancement opportunities for the workers.
"His worry is that . . . they will become dullards," Berry said. ". . . That is to say, they will be more likely to go on rampages or be whipped up by demagogues."
Kind of like what we have today, from Islamic fundamentalists to neo-Nazis.
Posthumously, Smith himself has fallen victim to some of capitalism's undesirable consequences.
"I'm in the Adam Smith building, which is the biggest insult to the man there could ever be," Berry told me. "It's one of these box-standard, rather ordinary 1960s buildings. And there's nothing surrounding it. There's no road named after him. No park named after him."
Hey, talk to the invisible hand.