Dedication

In today's conditions, where states are managed like commercial enterprises and every political power creates its own capital group to both build its own capital support and use this path to support politics in an irregular manner, listening to Adam Smith, the founder of capitalism, might perhaps cause a pang of conscience. In Ancient Greece, it was argued that the state administration staff should consist of moral and wise people. This means that being a moral and wise person was an individual virtue in those times. In conditions where the morality, virtue, and wisdom of the past are replaced by the opportunism, cunning, and fraud of today, both Adam Smith, the founder of capitalism, and İsmet İnönü, the hero of the War of Independence, can only be viewed like a dream that remains in the imagination.      

Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy and economics who was appointed as a professor of literature at the University of Glasgow in 1751, was brought to the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1752 and published his book on morality during this period, wrote the most influential book that established the theory—though not the first—of capitalist economic doctrine in 1776, and enabled the rise of the “laissez-faire, laissez-passer” discourse, which is still consciously or unconsciously on our tongues today, based on the philosophy of “self-interest” and “natural liberty.” Smith, as if he had foreseen today, did not neglect to add the following paragraph to the end of Book I, Chapter XI of his famous book, The Wealth of Nations:

“The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

These are the views of a moral and economic theorist examining the interests of merchants and businessmen versus the public interest.

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What could be more natural than people who love and praise trade criticizing the CHP! For, in the second volume of Kadro Magazine, in his article titled “The Statism Characteristic of Our Party,” İsmet İnönü says the following about the merchant group that Smith says deceives the public:

“It is the State that has kept many of the freest institutions standing against harsh storms for years due to various crises. In a free field like trade, the government has taken special measures in recent years to protect merchants who have fallen into difficult situations (for example, tobacco merchants). Monopolies intervene in the market every year during harvest time. And I have seen many entrepreneurs who, one year, fantasize against ‘state monopoly’ and ‘statism,’ but who spend all their intellect to ensure that monopolies intervene in the market when the season comes.”

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The interest and behavior of the sacred businessman (!) and the business world, which conflicts with the public interest and, in Smith's words, oppresses or even deceives the public, are defined this way in the world of theory and politics. When such an interest group seizes politics, does it think of and protect the public interest it claims to be burning with a passion to serve, or its own interest and that of the circle it belongs to? In today's conditions, where states are returning to feudalism or even primitive tribal structures, can the replacement of morality and ethics with deceptive religiosity be coincidental!

Dedicated to those concerned and the guardians of ideological protection!