Smith could not conceive of a society in which the welfare of the poor and hungry would not matter, or where people in general would behave in unethical or immoral ways. In the environment within which conventional economics was born, in Smith s time, pursuit of self-interest might have served the interests of society reasonably well. But, the world has changed over the past 200 years. Today, giant corporations dominate almost every sector of local and global economies. Corporations are inherently non-human entities regardless of what the Supreme Court has said and regardless of the nature of their managers and stockholders.
Corporations have no heart, they have no soul.
The basic economic resources of land, labor, capital, and management now reside in separate entities, sometimes divided even among nations. Land has become just another marketable commodity to be exploited and used up. Producers and consumers have become disconnected, geographically and conceptually, as a consequence of industrialization. Consumers no longer have any personal knowledge of where their products come from or of who is involved in their production. The pressures of growing populations and rising per capita consumption are now depleting resources of the land far faster than they can be regenerated by nature.