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The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.

Adam Smith

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Adam Smith
Age: 67 †
Born: 1723
Born: June 16
Died: 1790
Died: July 17
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Lang Toun
Worked
Fiat
Fool
Minority
Generations
Fools
Money
Minorities
Problem
Rewards
Handle
Saved
Generation

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Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.
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Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.
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It is unjust that the whole of society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society.
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The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.
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Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.
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Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.
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It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.
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With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.
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Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.
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I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.
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Wonder... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature.
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The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce.
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The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. ...People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare... On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice.
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Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.
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Sugar, rum and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.
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The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade.
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That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is most often unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.
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Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.
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But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.
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