This is nonsense. Adam Smith didn’t need any lectures from anyone when it came to human nature. What Smith knew is that to function properly market participants require the protection of the law. It could only be otherwise if men were angels. This is why he was able to write:

Commerce and manufacture can seldom flourish long enough in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law… Commerce and manufacture, in short, can seldom flourish in any state in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government. (An Inquiry into the Nature and Wealth of Nations, LibertyClassics, 1981).

To therefore argue as Longstaff does is to not only do Smith an injustice but to argue that democracy is also “a loser’s game” because some politicians lie and cheat. Evidently logic and consistency are not Longstaff’s strong points. His sloppy grasp of logic is apparently compensated for by remarkable psychic powers. Why he can even channel Adam Smith. According Longstaff

Smith would urge us to create a level playing field in which honest traders win or lose on the basis of the price and quality of the products they offer to sell.

But it is because the field is not level that trade occurs at all. That’s why Smith wrote that

In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question, had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind. (Ibid.)

Longstaff falsely asserts that

For most of history, trade has been done by a combination of gunboats and bribes - with the large traders applying two principles: “Do unto others before they do it to you” and “Do whatever it takes”.

Even if this were true, it becomes an argument for more free trade, not more tariffs and regulations. He argues that

International traders and their governments have only one allegiance: to the people who produce the commodities they sell.

So what? This behaviour is completely in keeping with Smith’s brilliant insight that

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. (Ibid.)

What Smith so eloquently pointed out is that the market directs self-interest into serving the public good. It takes an economic illiterate like Longstaff to malign this productive process as a “zero-sum game”. Of course, he also complained about how foreign wheat subsidies harm our wheat farmers without having the wit to see that, despite the damage they actually do to our farmers, they are really subsidies to Australian consumers at the expense of foreign consumers.

What this idiot’s argument ultimately boils down to is that government intervention in the market place and the activities of corrupt bureaucrats proves that free trade doesn’t work. And some of my readers still wonder why I treat the likes of Longstaff with undisguised intellectual contempt.

Like nearly all self-righteous lefties, this pompous ass knows no economic theory or economic history and is totally ignorant of the history of economic thought. Yet he feels fully qualified to lecture the Sydney Morning Herald’s readership on these subjects.

What is really annoying, however, is that Australia’s rightwing lets him and his ideological ilk get away with it. And this is the same lot that has successfully conned Liberal politicians and corporations into thinking that they are the only ones capable of defending free enterprise.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor

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