Can Competitive Markets Knock Out Central Planning?
“Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it & He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776 Adam Smith s image of the invisible hand that guides the extended capitalist order has been the defining metaphor of free market philosophy for more than 200 years. It s only fitting, then, that one of the most important books about markets in years should invoke it. Brink Lindsey s Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism is a hard-hitting, richly documented defense of markets that takes as its animating premise the idea that the invisible hand is presently weighed down by the dead hand of collectivism. Lindsey s thesis is that the unworkable policies, flawed economic practi
