In his book Living Together, David Schmidtz makes a simple but profound observation about a much-quoted passage from Adam Smith’s. The Treasure of Nations. Smith says:
It is not from the goodness of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their consideration of their own interests. We talk to ourselves, not to their personality but to their self-love, and we never talk to them about our needs but about their benefits. No one but a beggar wants to depend too much on the kindness of his fellow citizens.
A cursory reading of this passage may lead some to believe that Smith is saying that the only motivation we can have for helping one another is for personal gain. But Schmidtz makes it clear what Smith really means:
Second, it makes perfect sense for an author whose first book treated kindness as a key factor to later ask how to respond kindly to business partners. Why, as a kind person who hopes to drive trucks and salesmen and bakers, do you talk about their love? Answer: because you want them to live better because they came to you. Note that Smith does not say that bakers are motivated only by self-love. He says we talk to us not in their good behavior but in their self-love (WN, Book I, chap. 2). This is a reflection of our mind, not theirs. He does not give insight into the self-love of the bakers but into what is needed to be kind in our dealings with them.
In short, the author of Moral Emotions he gives the main platform to virtue and goodness, but, in explaining what righteousness means, the author of The Treasure of Nations he proves the obvious: that is, a truly kind man wants his partners to be better with him than without him. The point of talking about love to other people is to give them what they deserve. Such is the success of the human effort to be compassionate.
If we understand the exchange of the market in this way, we can see how the market helps to promote and encourage something that is very good and brings humanity to us. At worst, humanity can seek to make itself better at the expense of others. But when we cooperate and trade freely and agree on mutually beneficial exchanges, we improve our situation and improve the lives of those around us. We make people live better by working with us than they otherwise would.
A very different view was expressed by Harold Daggett, head of the International Longshoremen’s Association, a prominent labor union. As recently highlighted by Jim Geraghty, Daggett made the following claim about E-ZPass replacing highway tollbooths:
Take an E-ZPass. The first time they came out with E-ZPass, one lane, and cars were going by and everybody was sitting in their car and going, ‘What’s that about? I’ll get one of them.’ Today, all those union jobs are gone, and it’s all E-ZPass. People don’t realize that, everybody has three cars, everybody has E-ZPass in the window, and they go through like it’s nothing, and they get charged for postage. They didn’t care about this union worker working the booth.
Daggett’s motives are far removed from the benevolence advocated by Adam Smith. Daggett clearly sees that for drivers, E-ZPass represents a significant improvement. It enables people to get to their destination faster, with less congestion and less time wasted, and makes the payment process much easier and hassle-free. And the benefits of E-ZPass extend beyond that. By reducing traffic, they reduce pollution, which means that the benefits are wasted on more people than drivers waiting to enter the toll booth. The study also revealed that this had significant health benefits for people living near tollbooths. Using E-ZPass led to a significant decrease in both preterm births and low birth weight in families living near toll plazas.
But for Daggett, none of these benefits seem to matter. He seems not to be motivated by the desire for drivers or society as a whole to be “better for him than without him.” Instead, he is more bitter than the drivers and families who can be kept in the worst situation to make union workers better. The common perception that union leaders are motivated by benevolence and free market advocates are unsympathetic could not be further from the truth. There is nothing good in insisting that other people be made worse for your own benefit, and there is great kindness in wanting to make sure that those you work with are made better for you.
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