… is from page 12 of Thomas Sowell’s excellent 1987 volume, A Conflict of Visions:
The moral limitations of man in general, and his egocentricity in particular, were neither lamented by [Adam] Smith nor regarded as things to be changed. They were treated as inherent facts of life, the basic constraint in his vision. The fundamental moral and social challenge was to make the best of the possibilities which existed within that constraint, rather than dissipate energies in an attempt to change human nature – an attempt that Smith treated as both vain and pointless.
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