No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.
Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
More significantly, one of the first discussions within the text of precisely what wealth is (on which Smith has several, and occasionally inconsistent, answers, and which he seems to think of as more a flow than a stock.)
One of Smith's principle complaints in his text was what we now call "market failures" and "regulatory capture".
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...>