Something in this quote triggered the meme that you can say anything and just attribute it to some famous dead person and people will assume it’s true. So i did the right thing and googled and it turns out the quote is at least mostly right. As i found it with my googling is: “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” -Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter VI I think that leaving out the “like all other men” might misrepresent the actual thoughts of adam smith a bit without proper markings i am still happy that i spent 20 minutes of my life fact checking a random comment on the internet.
If you read the entirety of both Wealth of Nations, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I believe that you’ll find that pulling the segment of “like all other men” out of the original quote reflects the sentiments of Mr. Smith correctly. He used that phrase to mean all other men of capital, not the entirety of the human species. He spells that out in his previous work “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” but to leave the quote unabridged allows for bad faith arguments against the spirit of the author’s self proclaimed intentions of artificially and quickly expanding wealth so that the nations could work together to create utopia eventually. Adam never intended us to stick with capitalism after the late 1800s by his own benchmarks in both volumes.
