Adam Smith's well-known allusion to "the invisible hand of the market" has too long been misunderstood or, perhaps, intentionally misrepresented. The hand to which Mr. Smith referred of course cannot be considered to be literally invisible, although indeed it does remain unseen. It is very much similar, in this regard, to the hand of the card sharp.
In the previous century this hand tossed onto the table several different famous deals. I write here of such things as "the square deal" and then "the new deal" and finally "the fair deal." Some consider these various shufflings of the deck to have delivered reasonable programs and policies. Too few saw that, in fact, a substantial number of Americans had been dealt a decidedly raw deal.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), born during "the new deal," did create a federal minimum wage, specificed the number of hours that constituted a full-time work week and required overtime pay for all labor beyond it. What was not seen clearly, however, when the cards were being dealt was that Black Americans had received nothing less than a raw deal. Agricultural labor and domestic work were exempt from the provisions of the FLSA. Since at the time, especially in the South, many African-Americans toiled on farms or in homes as servants, they received nothing but confirmation that their second-class status and inhumane expoitation would continue.
In the present century the raw deal continues to be dealt. Today, however, more and more of us are coming to be aware of things. The revelations regarding the manner in which Goldman Sachs did business, the ways in which securitized mortgage investments were fashioned to explode, and the mass fraud involved with home foreclosures- all these things have permitted us to see plainly with our own eyes the hand of the card sharp at work. The members of the political class, for the most part in cahoots with the card sharp, poke their fingers into each others' eyes, howl most eerily, and hurl imprecations in all directions only to sit down exhausted to accomplish nothing.
That we know now all of these things burdens us with a most ponderous question: What is to be done? Were the likes of Maximilien Robespierre or Antoine Saint-Just among us perhaps we might have some good advice.
