User talk:Reb enfilade

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Dear Reb enfilade,

Thank you for your concern about the article on Steuart. According to the most respected experts in the field (the ones I quote under secondary sources) he can be called a moderate mercantilist which is actually a much more balanced evaluation of his views than Adam Smith's. Your - supposedly Marxist - analysis will in my view clearly not qualify as NPOV. I think even Marx himself showed more sense of nuance on this issue in his Theories of Surplus Value. In plain English: if an economist proposes the kind of government intervention in international trade that Steuart advocates, he is - by common consensus of the leading writers in the field - qualified as a (moderate) mercantilist. There have been no differences of opinion or debates about this. The other important aspect of the issues you raise is that Steuart indeed provides a wealth of historical information to support his arguments, and many historians of economic thought assume that Smith appears to ignore Steuart in his Wealth of Nations precisely because Steuart's analysis provided a credible alternative to his own views. Most of the text was put up by another contributor and came from the Encyclopedia Brittanica. I would suggest we respect that source.Robertsch55 (talk) 10:06, 14 March 2008 (UTC)