Robert Heilbroner The Wealth Of Nations Summary

Robert Heilbroner, author of The Making of Economic Society, describes the three types of economies: traditional, command, and market. A market economy is “an organization that, in truly remarkable fashion, allows society to ensure its own provisioning with a minimum of recourse to either tradition or command.” Clearly, Heilbroner believes a market economy to be the best. Adam Smith strongly holds this belief as well. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith emphasizes the importance of free-trade and the right to individual property, and he believes that this will lead us to a prosperous nation. Through this system, modern capitalism places a primacy on self-interest. Although Smith would argue that a system that adheres to pure capitalism would create equality in the sense that a harder-to-do job would be compensated more, and vice-versa, the simple truth is that we don’t live in this kind of world. Furthermore, the reason we don’t live in this kind of society is because of the valuation of self-interest in the first place. This is because self-interest is inherently focused on how an individual can get ahead, which leads to its greatest problem: greed. In our contemporary world, we see greed being most expressed in its worst form as economic inequality. As illustrated by the economist Joseph

Nestle is only one example of a company being ruled by greed that is affecting the world in a horrible way. As reported by the Global Exchange, an international human rights organization, Nestle knowingly buys resources to make chocolate from West African cocoa farms that use child slavery. In a lawsuit filed against them on the behalf of Malian children, the kids are described as being “trafficked from Mali to the Ivory Coast and forced to work 12 to 14 hour days with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent beatings.” Almost nobody in the world would want this to happen, so what could Nestle do to become more