ABSTRACT
Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand is still very visible in economics books and in the ideology of laissez-faire political-economic conservatism. The idea is that a competitive market will allocate resources according to consumer demand, the self-interest of producers being made by the invisible hand of the market to serve consumer interests more reliably than dependence on producer beneficence. No one ever supposed that producer beneficence could supply public needs. But a careful reading of Adam Smith would emphasize the importance of competition in the market, and indeed the necessity of efforts to maintain competition in the face of the alleged tendency of businessmen to use even luncheon meetings to hatch plots at the expense of the consumer.
