Robert Heilbroner Quotes
Smith, as we have said, was not the proponent of any one class. He was a slave to his system. His whole economic philosophy stemmed from his unquestioning faith in the ability of the market to guide the system to its point of highest return. The market — that wonderful social machine — would take care of society's needs if it was left alone. "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production," he wrote.
Heilbroner, Robert L. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers. 7th ed., Simon & Schuster, 1999, p. 70.
[Most theoretical conservative economists believe this. When presented with the reality of market systems where great damage was done to people and areas, as in the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession in 2008, they tend to argue that these were not really free markets—–that for various reasons, often they argue that government interference, corrupted the free market. Almost all economists would agree that if there were real highly competitive market his quote would be corrupt, but many have shown that the very greed that is produced by a free market tends to make the major players transform the market to reduce their risk and increase their power, thus producing monopoly, oligarchy, collusion, and anti-competitive practices. Greed is never harmless if it gets enough power.]
Robert L. Heilbroner was an American economist and historian of economic thought. The author of some 20 books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
