Antiwork

“The norms of the market aren’t driven by our norms or the values of society. Many of our problems come from the failure to recognise what Smith was saying, and the corruption of his work. We live in a society where ethics and morality are unfortunately determined by markets and corporations.”

Smith’s writings are “simply contrary to the neoliberal paradigm”. He would have been appalled, MacDonald says, by “the accumulation of wealth on the scale we see in the world today” by figures like Elon Musk. Smith certainly cared about “generating wealth” but he also cared about “how we deal with inequality. He favoured government legislation to help the poor”.

MacDonald adds: “He said the primary interest of government should be ensuring that there’s proper distribution of wealth, that if we’re doing well we can’t simply look at others and think ‘he’s not, but I don’t care’ – which is the ethos today.”

Ensuring proper distribution of wealth seems to be the last thing governments are prepared to do, or even discuss in any serious way.