Adam Smith

"In that one year at Harvard, the amount and breadth of my reading were something I never again matched later. I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Shaw; Churchill’s memoirs of World War II; famous speeches by modern American presidents; American history; Wells’s world history; several English books about China; and I also ventured into a few classical giants such as Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and even Marx’s Capital. Besides these major works, I subscribed to two newspapers, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor published in Boston, as well as Time magazine."

"Adam Smith’s: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” We should add: “But don’t expect anyone to like the butcher very much.”"

"The venture capitalists did not feel they had received that. One of the things they were most upset about was precisely that the agency had not been sufficiently proactive. They argue that they have been doing things the same way for twenty years, so why has no one said anything until now? The Director General of the Swedish Tax Agency, Ingemar Hansson, has worked with taxes all his life. He helped prepare the ”Tax Reform of the Century” in 1990–91, and has served under nearly seven finance ministers of various political affiliations, most recently Anders Borg. He likes the subject because it affects the economy. A number nerd who plays golf when he is not calculating the nation’s taxes. Hansson formulates the conflict like this: – Some have said that we changed the legal application, but that’s not true. Since we have not investigated the venture capitalists, they have not been actively approved, but psychologically they may have perceived it as such because they have not been rejected. But most citizens probably consider an approved tax return to be just that—approved. The philosopher Adam Smith established as early as 1776, in ”Wealth of Nations,” that even the tax authority has certain obligations. “The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to every other person.” But Swedish tax law is not precise. It says that certain actions intended to evade taxes constitute tax avoidance. This means that one not only has to follow the rules of the game, but sometimes also its intentions."

"The Tax Agency’s goal was for its officials to be perceived as support for the taxpayers; they should get help to do the right thing. That was the message. The venture capitalists did not feel they had received that. One of the things they were most upset about was precisely that the agency had not been sufficiently proactive. They argue that they have been doing things the same way for twenty years, so why has no one said anything until now? The Director General of the Swedish Tax Agency, Ingemar Hansson, has worked with taxes all his life. He helped prepare the ”Tax Reform of the Century” in 1990–91, and has served under nearly seven finance ministers of various political affiliations, most recently Anders Borg. He likes the subject because it affects the economy. A number nerd who plays golf when he is not calculating the nation’s taxes. Hansson formulates the conflict like this: – Some have said that we changed the legal application, but that’s not true. Since we have not investigated the venture capitalists, they have not been actively approved, but psychologically they may have perceived it as such because they have not been rejected. But most citizens probably consider an approved tax return to be just that—approved. The philosopher Adam Smith established as early as 1776, in ”Wealth of Nations,” that even the tax authority has certain obligations. “The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to every other person.” But Swedish tax law is not precise. It says that certain actions intended to evade taxes constitute tax avoidance. This means that one not only has to follow the rules of the game, but sometimes also its intentions."

"It’s a wonderfully interactive and self-supporting system, the in¬ dustrialist’s dream: cash flows in as revenue from outside customers; flows through to other subsidiaries to pay for goods and services; moves on, through, and across divisions. Ultimately, cash is kept in- house and paid further along the line as dividends, profits, accounts payable, and interest to parent companies. It’s the capitalist system at its most functional, the ideal envisioned by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations which, more than a tome on economics, is a model of how the world works, when it works, to maximize efficiency and profitability in mercantile operations."

"He cautioned against expectations that the state should do everything, which anyway is not in the interest of society. Besides, Adam Smith had warned that if you expect that the state should do something for you, you must be prepared that the state could do something to you."

"I was discussing the construction industry with one of the analysts when he asked me what I thought about going into construction equipment rental. I hadn’t heard of it, but I kept an open mind. It turned out to be exactly what it sounds like: Companies buy machines like boom lifts and backhoes and rent them out to contractors who need the equipment but don’t need to own it. My team and I moved fast to scrutinize the industry before concluding the big trend was the most exciting we’d come across so far. The addressable market had only 15 percent rental penetration, which didn’t make any commercial sense. A lot of the equipment in the remaining 85 percent was sitting idle on worksites getting rusty and dusty. We could capitalize on that disconnect. In addition, the equipment rental industry was growing organically; had only one national provider, a subsidiary of Hertz; and offered thousands of potential acquisitions, without widespread computerization or standardization. It was a big, juicy opportunity, and only a matter of time before economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of capitalism” swooped in. United Rentals was born."