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Adam Smith on international laws and national relations

“The regard for the laws of nations, or for those rules which independent states profess or pretend to think themselves bound to observe in their dealings with one another, is often very little more than mere pretence and profession. From the smallest interest, upon the slightest provocation, we see those rules every day either evaded or directly violated without shame or remorse. Each nation foresees, or imagines it foresees, its own subjugation in the increasing power and aggrandisement of any of its neighbours; and the mean principle of national prejudice is often founded upon the noble one of the love of our own country.”

Adam Smith, taken from “The Wisdom of Adam Smith, A Collection of His Most Incisive And Eloquent Observations, Edited by Benjamin A Rogge, page 173.

4 comments to Adam Smith on international laws and national relations

  • Murray Lewis

    Simple economics: Buy a house for $33,000 with a typical loan, pay it off, the banking racketeers collect,roughly, $66,000 of the cost of the house, they did not drive a nail, grow a tree or do anything productive, in spite of the charade that they made it possible by “loaning the money”. Then the government racketeers steal a trillion dollars, roughly, from the people who create the wealth, through taxation, which is legalized theft, and counterfeiting, which is what the federal reserve does with their printing presses, and gives it to the banking racketeers, Timothy Geitner, and everyone loses. Simple ecomonics. Does 2+2 really equal 4 ?

  • Laird

    Silly argument. If I own a house and permit you to live in it, is it somehow wrong for me to ask you to pay rent? Of course not. So if I “rent” you the money to buy a house directly, why now is it wrong for me to charge you for its use? Money is just stored wealth, and if you make use of someone else’s wealth (whether in tangible or intangible form) you should compensate the owner. Anything else is theft.

  • Simple economics: Buy a house for $33,000 with a typical loan, pay it off, the banking racketeers collect,roughly, $66,000 of the cost of the house

    I hope you did not pay anyone to get that lesson in simple economics, because if you did, you wuz robbed… If you do not wish to pay the price of using someone else’s money, no one is forcing you to borrow it.

    they did not drive a nail, grow a tree or do anything productive

    Then grow your own trees, hammer your own nails and don’t borrow other people’s money to pay someone else to do all that stuff for you.

  • Paul Marks

    This discussion depends on the banks lending out real savings – rather than money the govenment has created (and then “lent” to the banks at a sweetheart rate of interest).

    The people may not know the details of how modern banking is a fraud – but they smell it is a fraud.

    That is the reason rich bankers are unpopular – whereas other very rich men (such as Mike Dell of Dell computers) are not unpopular.

    As for fractional reserve banking without central banking – well I will dodge the theoretical issue (my opinons are rather hostile and other people’s opinions are not). But there is some common ground here.

    Whether or not fractional reserve banking is fraud in-its-self not allowing a franctional reserve bank to go bankrupt (in the normal way of bankruptcy) certainly is corrupt.

    And such corruption will have an economic as well as a moral cost.