The ‘Invisible Hand’

Abstract

Home-market monopolies undoubtedly encourage those industries sheltering behind them, increasing the employment and stock they draw upon, but ‘whether it tends either to increase the general industry of society, or to give it the most advantageous direction, is not, perhaps, altogether so evident.’ The quantity of industry in society cannot expand beyond what its capital can maintain; all that can happen is part of it may be diverted from where it otherwise would have gone, without the certainty that the artificial direction it takes is likely to be more advantageous to society than that into which it would have gone of its own accord.¹