"That insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a politician or statesman" meets little mercy for his effort compared to the magic power of the natural order.

"In all countries where there is a tolerable security," he writes, "every man of common understanding will endeavor to employ whatever stock he can command in procuring either present enjoyment or future profit." Individual spontaneity is thus the root of economic good; and the real justification of the state is the protection it affords to this impulse.
Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he is bound by nature to discover the means most apt to progress.
Nor was he greatly troubled by differences of fortune.

Like most of the Scottish school, especially Hutcheson and Hume, he thought that men are much alike in happiness, whatever their station or endowments.

For there is a "never-failing certainty" that "all men sooner or later accommodate themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation"; though he admits that there is a certain level below which poverty and misery go hand in hand.

But, for the most part, happiness is simply a state of mind; and he seems to have had but little suspicion that differences of wealth might issue in dangerous social consequence.