“For one thing, Smith roundly mistrusted businessmen. In addition to the sallies already quoted, he insisted that businessmen, for all they may talk of freedom and fairness, ‘generally have an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.‘ One example out of many from The Wealth of Nations:

‘Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.’”

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[via Nerdcore]

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Critics worry that markets need a moral foundation that they automatically erode. They ridicule the naïve belief that free markets bring everybody happiness at no cost, a conviction allegedly lacking all philosophical underpinnings. This is entirely off the mark. The last thing one can say about Smith is that he lacked philosophical depth.

It is hard to ignore the fact that today, in addition to the Keynesian effects of mutually reinforced decline, we are strongly in the presence of “errors of…undue pessimism.” …
Despite huge injections of fresh liquidity into the American and European economies, largely from the government, the banks and financial institutions have until now remained unwilling to unfreeze the credit market. …
One of the problems that the Obama administration has to deal with is that the real crisis, arising from financial mismanagement and other transgressions, has become many times magnified by a psychological collapse. …
The present economic crises do not, I would argue, call for a “new capitalism,” but they do demand a new understanding of older ideas, such as those of Smith and, nearer our time, of Pigou, many of which have been sadly neglected.

I heart Adam Smith:
“I’m really glad I got a chance to finally read A Theory of Moral Sentiments closely. It is I think deeply incoherent in a way that highly recommends it, because it is the incoherence of lived moral reality.“

[via]

“I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, … and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury.”
[Quelle: Liberty Fund]

Nach Humes Tod bestätigte Adam Smith in einem veröffentlichten Brief dessen ruhige Gemütsverfassung und Charakterstärke. Dieses “harmlose Blatt Papier” brachte Smith mehr Unannehmlichkeiten in den erhitzten öffentlichen Stellungnahmen ein als sein nach eigenen Worten “heftiger Angriff auf das gesamte Wirtschaftssystem Großbritanniens“.
Beide Texte, Humes Rückblick und Adam Smiths Brief, sind in der Online Library of Liberty abrufbar:

David Hume – MY OWN LIFE
Adam Smith – LETTER FROM ADAM SMITH, LL.D. TO WILLIAM STRAHAN, ESQ.

Freges ‘Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik’ als pdf, via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Das erste Kapitel aus Samuel Fleischacker: ‘On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations – A Philosophical Companion’