The Grumbling Hive Revisited: Or, Private Greed, Public Need

Includes the original ?The Grumbling Hive: or Knaves Turn?d Honest? by Bernard de Mandeville, which first separated virtue from prosperity. With 400 lines of doggerel, Bernard de Mandeville's ?The Grumbling Hive? offended eighteenth-century England with its assertion that a flourishing economy grew out of private greed, selfishness, and vice. Published three centuries ago, the short work, denounced from pulpit to parliament, nevertheless helped inspire the free-market propositions of Adam Smith (an invisible hand guiding our affairs far more efficiently than government regulation). Plagued as we are today with Smith disciples while the world's largest free economy impoverishes many of its people and stumbles into debt, we may be grateful for these additional lines of doggerel, revealing how the Hive has fared since deciding greed was good.