This it is that gives a majesty so pure and touching to the historic figure of Christ; self-abandonment to God, uttermost surrender, without reserve or stipulation, to the guidance of the Holy Spirit from the Soul of souls; pause in no darkness; hesitation in no perplexity, recoil in no extremity of anguish, but a gentle unfaltering hold of the invisible Hand, of the Only Holy and All Good--these are the features that have made Jesus of Nazareth the dearest and most sacred image to the heart of so many ages.
What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.
The governments of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which. . . . pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I.
Something in my gut twisted so hard that it felt like I was being tickled by an invisible hand, and it took me a moment to realize what it was. Hope. It had been so long since I'd felt it that the sensation was like something living inside me, something wonderful waiting to break free, just like I was.
The invisible hand is not perfect. Indeed, the invisible hand is a little bit arthritic. . . I'm a believer in free markets, but I think we need to be less naïve. We need to accept that markets give us pretty good solutions, but occasionally they will lock in something inferior.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.
If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. They are themselves, always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.
Adam Smith is an egalitarian, he believed in equality of outcome, not opportunity. He is an enlightenment figure, pre-capitalist. He says, suppose in England, one landowner got most of the land and other people would have nothing to live on. He says it wouldn't matter much, because the rich land owner, by virtue of his sympathy for other people would distribute resources among them, so that by an invisible hand, we would end up with a pretty egalitarian society. That is his conception of human nature.
The effect of capitalism is to steer human selfishness so that, through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the capitalist produce the abundance from which the whole society benefits.
The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.
That invisible hand of Adam Smith seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people.
Americans have always pursued our dreams within a free market that has been the engine of our progress. It's a market that has created a prosperity that is the envy of the world, and rewarded the innovators and risk-takers who have made America a beacon of science, and technology, and discovery. But the American economy has worked in large part because we have guided the market's invisible hand with a higher principle - that America prospers when all Americans can prosper. That is why we have put in place rules of the road to make competition fair, and open, and honest.
Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society. . . 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 not part of his intention
As the great naturalist Charles Darwin saw clearly, individual and collective interests often coincide, as in the invisible hand narrative. But he also saw that in many other cases, interests at the two levels are squarely in conflict, and that in those cases, individual interests generally trump. That simple observation suggests that market failure is often the result not of insufficient competition (the traditional charge from social critics on the Left), but of the very logic of competition itself.
What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy.
The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.
There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.
Conservatives may worship Adam Smith's 'invisible hand,' but for Obama, the helping hand comes in large measure from the public, not the private sector. To call this 'socialism' is to do violence to the word and to the concept. To call it 'un-American' is a smear.