Adam Smith had more complicated views on economic, philosophical and political questions that some of his supporters or detractors assume. Here is a quote from him on banking, a sector which has contributed so much to our current financial crisis:
"It is not by augmenting the capital of the country, but by rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive than would otherwise be so, that the most judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country. " - Adam Smith
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It is better if people read the whole of Adam Smith’s chapter on banking in Wealth Of Nations, ‘Of Money considered as a particular Branch of the general Stock of the Society, or of the Expense of maintaining the National Capital’ (Book II, chapter ii, pp 286-320; Oxford University Press, 1976, or pp 270-313, Edwin Canaan’s 1937 edition, Random House edition).
They will find Smith’s late 18th-century grand panorama of banking practices in Britain including the role of money as the ‘Great Wheel of Circulation’ of the economy, of the prudent banking that adds to the capital stock and to productive labour, of the imprudent and fraudulent behaviour of some individuals and, alas, some bankers, and the need on occasion for government intervention by laws and regulations to prevent the contagion of malpractice and dangerous behaviour.
Of the latter he had this to say about necessary government intervention (perhaps of great relevance for those of who reject any intervention on principle:
“To restrain private people, it may be said, from receiving in payment the promissory notes of a banker, for any sum whether great or small, when they themselves are willing to receive them, or to restrain a banker from issuing such notes, when all his neighbours are willing to accept of them, is a manifest violation of that natural liberty which it is the proper business of law not to infringe, but to support. Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments, of the most free as well as of the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed.” (WN II.ii.94: p 324)
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