CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

286 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
Believing that a capacity for moral behavior is inherent, Smith says:
“Nature has implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill desert,
those terrors of merited punishment, as the great safeguards of the association
of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent and to chastise
the guilty.” 14
On wealth and corruption, Smith says: “This disposition to admire and
almost to worship the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or at least to neglect,
persons of poor and mean condition, is the great and most universal
cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness
are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom
and virtue, and that contempt is often most unjustly bestowed upon
poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.” 15
On justice and harmony, Smith writes: “Society may subsist, though
not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence, but the prevalence
of injustice must utterly destroy it. . . . 16 Hence it is, that to feel much for
others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish and to indulge our
benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature and can
alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in
which consists their whole grace and propriety.” 17
Moral Sentiments is filled page after page with Smith’s view of the “amiable
virtues” befitting men of character: “perfection,” “modesty,” “moderation,”
“tranquility,” “veracity,” “duty,” “order,” “harmony,” “grace,” “taste,”
“judgment,” “prudence,” “probity,” “delicacy,” “gratitude,” “kindness,” and
“generosity.” This is the perspective—upright, principled, conscientious,
and trustworthy—that he brought to all his teachings and writings. These
are the people, people of sincerity and sympathy, that he envisioned would
operate the free-market system he laid out in Wealth of Nations, the second
of his great contributions to Enlightenment thought and to the centuries
that followed.
WEALTH OF NATIONS
Adam Smith is credited with creating the field of political economy and
providing free enterprise, later called “capitalism,” with its most persuasive
argument. In its original insights and its consolidation of earlier analyses,
the book adds the everyday business of commerce to the liberalizing