Irrespective of historical influence, The Wealth of Nations represented a clear paradigm shift in the field of economics,[10] comparable to what Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was for philosophy.

The quantity of real metal in coins has diminished, due to the "avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states," enabling them to pay their debts in appearance only, and to the defraudment of creditors.

It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries of the world, in North America, in Europe, and in China; which renders it rapidly progressive in the first, slow and gradual in the second, and altogether stationary in the last.

Of Wages and Profit in the Different Employments of Labour and Stock: Smith repeatedly attacks groups of politically aligned individuals who attempt to use their collective influence to manipulate the government into doing their bidding.

At the time, these were referred to as "factions", but are now more commonly called "special interests," a term that can comprise international bankers, corporate conglomerations, outright oligopolies, trade unions and other groups.

When an artificer has acquired a little more stock than is necessary for carrying on his own business in supplying the neighbouring country, he does not, in North America, attempt to establish with it a manufacture for more distant sale, but employs it in the purchase and improvement of uncultivated land.

Adam Smith goes on to say "According to the natural course of things, therefore, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is, first, directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and last of all to foreign commerce".

The towns were deserted, and the country was left uncultivated, and the western provinces of Europe, which had enjoyed a considerable degree of opulence under the Roman empire, sunk into the lowest state of poverty and barbarism.

These last were composed chiefly of the proprietors of lands, among whom the public territory was originally divided, and who found it convenient to build their houses in the neighbourhood of one another, and to surround them with a wall, for the sake of common defence.

The people to whom it is granted as a privilege that they might give away their own daughters in marriage without the consent of their lord, that upon their death their own children, and not their lord, should succeed to their goods, and that they might dispose of their own effects by will, must, before those grants, have been either altogether or very nearly in the same state of villanage with the occupiers of land in the country.How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country: Smith often harshly criticised those who act purely out of self-interest and greed, and warns that, ...[a]ll for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

In fact, he attacked most forms of government interference in the economic process, including tariffs, arguing that this creates inefficiency and high prices in the long run.

The colony settled its own form of government, enacted its own laws, elected its own magistrates, and made peace or war with its neighbours as an independent state, which had no occasion to wait for the approbation or consent of the mother city.

That system which represents the produce of land as the sole source of the revenue and wealth of every country has, so far as by that time, never been adopted by any nation, and it at present exists only in the speculations of a few men of great learning and ingenuity in France.

It would not, surely, be worthwhile to examine at great length the errors of a system which never has done, and probably never will do, any harm in any part of the world.Smith postulated four "maxims" of taxation: proportionality, transparency, convenience, and efficiency.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.

The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life...

[28] Of the Sources of the General or Public Revenue of the Society: In his discussion of taxes in Book Five, Smith wrote: The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor.

[32] The printer William Strahan wrote on 12 April 1776 that David Hume said The Wealth of Nations required too much thought to be as popular as Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

[35] In 1791, the English-born radical Thomas Paine wrote in his Rights of Man that "Had Mr. Burke possessed talents similar to the author 'On the Wealth of Nations,' he would have comprehended all the parts which enter into, and, by assemblage, form a constitution.

[37] In 1803, The Times argued against war with Spain: She is our best customer; and by the gentle and peaceable stream of commerce, the treasures of the new world flow with greater certainty into English reservoirs, than it could do by the most successful warfare.

They come in this way to support our manufactures, to encourage industry, to feed our poor, to pay taxes, to reward ingenuity, to diffuse riches among all classes of people.

[38] In 1810, a correspondent writing under the pseudonym of Publicola included at the head of his letter Smith's line that "Exclusive Companies are nuisances in every respect" and called him "that learned writer".

"[50] In the same year it was quoted by Samuel Whitbread MP and Fox (on the division of labour) in the debate on the armament against Russia and also by William Wilberforce in introducing his Bill against the slave trade.

[54]The Radical MP Richard Cobden studied The Wealth of Nations as a young man; his copy is still in the library of his home at Dunford House and there are marginal notes on the places where Smith criticizes British colonial policies.

It is that, under competition, owners of resources (labour, land, and capital) will use them most profitably, resulting in an equal rate of return in equilibrium for all uses (adjusted for apparent differences arising from such factors as training, trust, hardship, and unemployment).

[70] He also describes Smith's theorem that "the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market" as the "core of a theory of the functions of firm and industry" and a "fundamental principle of economic organisation.

"[71] Paul Samuelson finds in Smith's pluralist use of supply and demand—as applied to wages, rents, and profit—a valid and valuable anticipation of the general equilibrium modelling of Walras a century later.

Moreover, Smith's allowance for wage increases in the short and intermediate term from capital accumulation and invention added a realism missed later by Malthus and Ricardo in their propounding a rigid subsistence-wage theory of labour supply.

But he notes Smith's relevant attention to definite institutional arrangements and process as disciplining self-interest to widen the scope of the market, accumulate capital, and grow income.

The idea of barter, on the other hand, seems only to apply to limited exchanges between societies that had infrequent contact and often in a context of ritualised warfare, rendering its conceptualisation among economists as a myth.