ABSTRACT
There’s nothing new in American, Western, or global history about economic exploitation, elite rent-seeking, plutocracy, or the use by the rich of the state to increase their fortunes even as they complain about overreaching government power. Also less than novel are mass joblessness, endemic poverty, widespread economic insecurity resulting from the power of greedy profit-accumulators, and deceptive claims of compassion and benevolence on the part of greedy wealth-accumulators whose enterprises are dedicated to extracting wealth from the populace and the broader community-regardless of the cost to fellow humans and the Earth. Regarding the last pattern, the late eighteenth-century philosopher and economist Adam Smith (a founder of the field that was once properly called “political economy”) denounced what he called the “vile maxim of the [merchant-capitalist and financier] masters of mankind: ‘All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.’” Writing of England, the world’s first great capitalist power, Smith observed that “the principle architects” of policy were the great merchants and manufacturers who essentially owned the nation, and they made sure their own interests were “most particularly attended to,” regardless of how “grievous” the effects on others, including the people of their own supposedly beloved land of England.3 “Power,” John Adams once said, “always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.”4
