Socialist big-shot abuses Adam Smith

Peter Foster takes IMF Managing Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to task for his distortion/misinterpretation of Adam Smith's views on inequality and the distribution of wealth.  Strauss-Kahn attempts to recruit Smith to justify the redistribution of wealth as a solution to "poverty":

... I would venture that Smith’s eyes would pop out were he to witness the level of “poverty” about which Mr. Strauss-Kahn is rending his garments.

The notion of a “welfare state” was utterly alien both to Smith’s political times and his own moral inclinations. Smith lived in an age of personal responsibility. Poor relief was a local, personal affair, as was the “beneficence” that Smith praised as the highest virtue. “Beneficence,” wrote Smith, “is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.” ...

Strauss-Kahn's speech is another example of the left's obsession with income "gaps".  Absolute poverty, which has been dropping spectacularly thanks to the global free market economy, doesn't interest them.  Their interests are either useless emotional bleating about the poor or stoking envy as a means of boosting votes - not about practical, proven solutions which they constantly berate.