Russ Roberts has some ... mash note podcasts, peans to Adam Smith on EconTalk. He's much better situated to speak on it than I am. Shortly, Smith wrote "Theory

Russ Roberts has some ... mash note podcasts, peans to Adam Smith on EconTalk. He's much better situated to speak on it than I am. Shortly, Smith wrote "Theory of Moral Sentiments" before "Wealth". "Wealth" was a critique of Meracntilist (royal) patent systems. The short version is that capitalism has a moral founding. What we now call capitalism can be pretty amoral, but that's our doing. I'm hoping that a better understanding of rents can enable us to have a better capitalism. Principally, because I don't much think collectivism can be demonstrated to work, and collectivism is frequently seen as the answer to the excesses of what we call capitalism. If we see income from rents as less morally defensible than income from work then that's possibly a method for getting closer to what we want. As it is now, they're simply "profit". Rather than taking two binary positions - pro and anti capitalism - perhaps the work that needs to be done is a better critique of it , and a refinement of terminology. Finally, the ways in which we are unequal are much less ... physical than in the past. Capital itself has become more and more ephemeral, and it may be that returns to what I'd consider "real" capital - think a building full of lathes - is just as low as that to labor. So much inequality is due to the abstraction of control of capital.