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Weren't there trade unions back then, preventing a certain amount of competition? I'm not sure those days were some golden age of healthy market competition.

• dredmorbius 3y ago
  No. Certainly not general unions amongst unskilled labourers. As Smith himself notes: What are the common wages of labor, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties [(masters and workmen)], whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. ... The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of Parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...> The proto-labour organisations were probably the guilds, which existed in Smith's time, and in fact he helped find alternative employment for one guy who had been blackisted by the local Hammermen's Guild (the blacksmith's union, as it were), goes by the name of James Watt. Had him set up at the University of Edinburgh, and worked on one of the fire engines there. What we'd now call a steam engine. (And for all that, Smith utterly failed to realise what the import of that particular invention on the economic development of Britain during the 19th century would be....) The first general unions in the UK date to the 1820s and 1830s, roughly three to four decades after Smith, who died in 1790: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#National_general_unions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#National_general_u...>
  • yafbum 3y ago
    Yep, I was thinking of the guilds. There was a pretty strong concentration of wealth and power too, as noted in the quote you have.