One way to read Wealth of Nations

Given the length of it Adam Smith’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” has a number of possible interpretations. One that we find useful at times is as a prolonged scream against the iniquities of the guild economy:

Chris Young, coordinator of the Real Bread Campaign, said new bread labelling rules need to be imposed on supermarkets and leading bread companies to protect smaller-scale traditional bakeries. The campaigners have complained of a “sourfaux free-for-all”.

He said: “We believe many people are being misled when they are buying their bread. Making sourdough is a slower process. We would want the definition to be ‘bread made without additives and using a live sourdough starter culture’.”

The government has formed a bread and flour technical working group to review the regulations, and the Real Bread Campaign has submitted a raft of proposals for a radical overhaul of bread labelling.

One of the things which makes Wealth of Nations timeless - despite the length of the 18th century prose - is that there are always attempts to reimpose those guilds and guild rules upon the economy. Attempts which, as in the original scream, need to be fought against.

If Mr. Hughes and his compañeros wish to label their bread as “bread made without additives and using a live sourdough starter culture” then so be it. We do have truth in advertising laws and so if that’s what they say it is then that is - likely enough - what it is. And if people prefer to have something marked “sourdough” that does not meet that standard then the absence of “bread made without additives and using a live sourdough starter culture” will be something of a clue. There will be some portion of the nation that does prefer some modicum of the sourdough process, some modicum of the flavour and at half the price after all. The insistence upon “sourdough” meaning “bread made without additives and using a live sourdough starter culture” is an attempt to reimpose those guild distinctions of who may make what and how.

The other way to put this is that the people buying the bread are capable adults. This must be so otherwise we’d not be running a democracy where all have the vote. If people are to be trusted to select, by careful consideration, their political representatives then it logically follows that they can buy the bread they prefer.