And you go all the way back to Adam Smith and the wealth of nations and the idea of capitalism, you want people pursuing profit to do that in a way that is also good for the society.
Adam Smith is a hero of free market enthusiasts but as well as the wealth of nations, he wrote the theory of moral sentiments in which he behind how selfish so ever man may be supposed.
In his important work " The Wealth of Nations, " Adam Smith argued, amongst many other things, that the measurement of a country's wealth was not just its gold and silver reserves.
Eventually, Adam Smith, in his groundbreaking work The Wealth of Nations, 1776, and other economists declared that it was a flawed concept and it became discredited.
Inspired by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, he argued that manufacturing would increase economic productivity through the division of labour into small, specialised tasks.
While The Wealth of Nations was not the first systematic treatise on economics, it became the foundation of a tradition known as classical economics, which built upon Smith's work over the next century.
And this is from his The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, coincidentally, the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, and it's one of his most-famous excerpts.
这是他 1776 年出版的《国富论》(The Wealth of Nations),巧合的是,与美国独立宣言在同一年出版,这是他最著名的摘录之一。
经济学百科 The Economics Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained)
In 1776, when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, he noted that merchants around him commonly felt there were two reasons why business failed—a scarcity of money or overproduction.
According to the opening sentence of The Wealth of Nations, all commodities originate from labor, and labor is therefore the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.