Interdependence

Adam Smith's Lost Legacy

The essence of a commercial economy (Smith did not write about capitalism, a 19th-century phenonomenon) is the total dependence of everybody on everybody else. The truly ‘on-your-own’ society was common in the age of hunter-gatherers, the first age of humankind, and which at one time in the distant past was common all over the world or, as John Locke put it when discussing the tribal hunter-gatherer societies found in North America and written about by travellers from Europe, in the beginning ‘all the world was America’.

The division of labour and the propensity to ‘trade, barter, and exchange’ changed all that, first in Europe and then throughout the world, especially in modern day North America.

(...)[Mitt Romney] confuses the total and absolute dependence, we all share, on each other in our personal freedom to choose in a complex capitalist society, with a Marxian nightmare that everything would be collectivised and we would all become dependent, not on each other, but on the communist state, which is a wholly different ‘kettle of fish’.