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“What wast(sic) the invisible hand theory proposed by Adam Smith?”
Answer1: “the economy will automatically adjust to the needs of buyers and sellers.”
Answer 2: “Adam Smith's invisible hand refers to the self correcting features of a free market. Prices respond to the combined influences of supply and demand, and no regulatory agency or deliberate guidance is... “
Answer 3: “Adam's Smith's Invisible Hand of the Marketplace is the theory that economic imbalances are self-correcting, not requiring intervention by government so long as the equal rights of the individual are...”.
Answer 4: “The greatest benefit to a society is brought about by individuals acting freely in a competitive marketplace in the pursuit of their own self-interest.“
What has Answer 1 got to do with anything Adam Smith wrote?
Answer 2 reveals its nonsense in its own sentence: If prices respond to supply and demand, what role does the “invisible hand” play in this process? Surely visible price adjustments are enough?
Answer 3: what besides price changes are required for economic imbalances to be “self-correcting”. It cannot be a universal benign self-interest because we know that individual self-interests can conflict: a self-interested domestic trader lobbies for tariffs to keep out competition to maintain or raise prices; a consumer prefers access to foreign-sourced imports to lower prices. Adam Smith identifies malign self-interested actions over 70 times in Wealth Of Nations.
Answer 4: But suppose that individuals acting in their self-interest are also inclined to pollute, dilute quality, or dispose of waste from dangerous processes into the nearest fresh-water river to avoid the costs of clean-up to increase their profits, How does that “benefit society?”
The whole alibi of an invented “invisible hand”, attributed to Adam Smith, is a regrettable feature of modern economics. It discredits economic analysis (and the history of economic thought) and sends people running to the feeble protection of government (also a major polluter) and helps justify the often bloated regulatory costs of compliance with meddling anti-market initiatives, while discrediting those regulatory costs that are necessary.
None of these contradictory assertions were proposed by Adam Smith. He did not have a theory of "an invisible-hand" guiding markets.