Professor Homero Cuevas diagnosed that the content of the classic value theory attributed to Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Sraffa was incomplete or inadequately finished, and that such problem was addressed by exploring a Keynesian idea about the economic magnitudes in terms of labor wage. In the...

Many commentators claim Adam Smith failed to realize that no objective standard of value exists. Instead, he adhered to the labor theory of value. Like others, we argue that in the The Wealth of Nations Smith discussed the “early and rude state” in which the labor theory of value made some...

Adam Smith’s version of Virtue Ethics can be traced directly back to Plato (Socrates) and Aristotle. Smith basically skipped Aquinas and Augustine because they were also Catholic theologians, as well as philosophers. Referencing them would not have been looked upon kindly by the Scottish...

Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian tracts The Principles of Morals and Legislation and In Defense of Usury contains an explicit attack on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations on pages 8-23 in chapter Two of The Principles of Morals and Legislation, as well as on...

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provided a general analysis of virtue ethics (prudence, temperance, courage, justice, benevolence, where Smith combined the virtues of temperance and courage into the virtue of self command) that was applied to all areas of a human society...

Augustine’s argument about the failure of wealth to insure one’s happiness is very similar to Adam Smith’s position except that Augustine compares a lower income or middle income class citizen with a rich citizen while Smith compares a lower income class citizen,or poor citizen, with a...

Keynes provided an overwhelming argument in his letter of August 27th, 1935 to Harrod that convinced Harrod twice to acknowledge that Keynes had made a “radical reconstruction” of the theory of the rate of interest. Special significance can be given to Keynes's three point post script in...

Adam Smith and J M Keynes were both practitioners of virtue ethics who rejected Benthamite Utilitarianism. Their axiomatic foundations consist of the following three axioms only. The first is that probabilities are nonadditive, in general. Additivity is a special case. The second is that...

There can't be too much self-interest or self love, Prudence, for Adam Smith (or Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Buddha, etc.). Without prudent conduct and behavior at the individual level, nothing else is possible. Prudence is the bedrock foundation upon which all other virtues are build. There...