my problem

with Adam Smith’s famous metaphor of the Invisible Hand isn’t just that it’s now obviously a God-concept that projects the agency and desires of the wealthy and/or the powerful onto the economy as a whole.  Nor that it then calls the fact that the economy keeps the rich richer and the poor either jobless or working for the rich a magical outcome of the latter’s “self-regulation.”  [If so, how is self-regulation not the problem if in order for said regulation to happen the majority of the people on the planet have to be poor?  Anyway]

The idea of inherent human selfishness and natural scarcity that it represents bugs me a lot more—and seems only to justify the bourgeois version of reality that it claims to reflect—but I’ll bracket that fa now.

It’s more that when economists talk about said Hand, the metaphor freezes, and it somehow comes to have such a limited range of motion.  Milton Friedman called the Invisible Hand “the possibility of cooperation without coercion.”  Perhaps Mr. Friedman’s parents were the kind to spare the rod, but shit, how come no one talks about an invisible hand that wields weapons?   That touches people inappropriately?  That steals?  Why is a hand suddenly a benign thing?

Notes

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