Thanks, Paul, for putting "neoliberalism" back where it belongs - Reagan & Thatcher.

My favorite section that bashes both full deregulation along with the idea of businessmen knowing best how government should run (as a business) along with full socialism/government meddling, and applies to the by-default-concessions to Googles and Amazons of today as much as the officially granted concession for the East India trading company of yesteryear:

Under absolutely no circumstances, Smith thought, should merchants be put in charge of politics. Their monopolistic conspiracies would be ‘destructive’ to all countries ‘which have the misfortune to fall under their government’.

On Smith’s final analysis, the merchants were a pernicious but necessary part of large-scale economies

Nonetheless, something like the reverse was also true: politicians made for terrible merchants, and ought not to attempt to take over the systematic running of economic affairs. This was a product of the structural predicament faced by political leaders, whom Smith claimed have ‘scarce ever succeeded’ in becoming ‘adventurers in the common branches of trade’, despite often having been tempted to try, and often from a genuine desire to better their nation’s condition.

Politicians, according to Smith, were much poorer judges of where and how to allocate resources than the aggregated outcome of individuals spontaneously undertaking free exchange. As a result, in matters of trade it was usually folly for politicians to try to replace the vast network of buyers and sellers with any form of centralised command. This, however, included precisely those networks structured around the profit-seeking activities of merchant elites.

On Smith’s final analysis, the merchants were a potentially pernicious, but entirely necessary, part of the functioning of large-scale economies. The true ‘science of a statesman or legislator’ consisted in deciding how best to govern the merchants’ nefarious activities. Effective politicians had to strike a balance between granting economic elites the liberty to pursue legitimate commercial activities, while also applying control when such activities became vehicles for exploitation. In other words, Smith was very far from asking us to put our faith in ‘entrepreneurs’, those supposed ‘wealth-creators’ whom neoliberalism looks to as drivers of economic prosperity. On the contrary, giving the entrepreneurs free reign would be rather like putting the foxes in charge of the chicken coup.