THE HUFFINGTON POST: Why Adam Smith would be outraged today

Catherine Crier, Emmy and duPont-Columbia Award-winning journalist:
 Today, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is considered a Bible for capitalism. What we call capitalism is, in fact, the American version of mercantilism. Flying the capitalist flag, the really big guys have completely corrupted Smith’s free market philosophy. They use their concentrated wealth and power to buy off politicians and skate around regulations. They are destroying free enterprise by abusing the very freedoms intrinsic to a market economy.
 Smith stated emphatically that a strong government, acting through democratic and legal institutions, was the only entity capable of challenging such corporate power. Smith supported necessary government regulations, labor and human rights, public education, and progressive taxation to ease the economic and social inequities he knew would occur in a capitalist system. Without these “liberal” measures, social and political unrest would threaten a nation’s stability and his free market economy could not survive.
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