Adam Smith himself warned that fellow traders habitually conspire against the public

Evidence

In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith wrote, “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.” The English writer and publisher Mark Fisher went further, remarking in 2013 that much of what is packaged as conspiracies today is “the ruling class showing class solidarity”—by which he meant that it’s mostly just ultrarich people, in business and government, having one another’s back. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 775

Categorization

• CANDY: A quotable, surprising line: the patron saint of free markets openly said tradesmen meet to conspire against the public.
• XREF: Mark Fisher on class solidarity connects to the reader’s grasp of ‘the ruling class showing class solidarity’ as a frame for mirror-world grievances. — connects to: Nineteenth-century nationalism and capitalism’s own success forced a more interventionist state than Smith imagined. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 310; Adam Smith’s economic man arises from language, reason, and interdependence, not naked self-interest. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 185