“feeding the idle with the bread of the industrious, tends not only to beggar himself, but to impoverish his country.”

Wow that’s a pretty damming statement against welfare right? WRONG.

In context the idle is a rich land owner, and the industrious is the lower class worker!

Book II Chapter III is full of these kind of gems.

This is from the end of Book I. As a writer you know that the last word in a sentence, sentence in a paragraph, paragraph in a chapter etc. are powerful…well here is the last part of Book I…

“he 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.”

Basically “Don’t listen to businessmen. They want to cheat you and the general public. They always have, they always will.”

I’ve got the first third of the whole work all highlighted…I’ll post some more when I get a little time.