This week I finished:

Giants of Political Thought: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, volumes 1 and 2, read by Craig Dietschmann and a Supporting Cast: This audiobook isn’t the Wealth of Nations, but is a summary with many quotes from it. I got it from the library as a quick review. I don’t think I’ve read any of Wealth of Nations since college and never read it cover to cover.

Covering it after Friedman, Hayek, Bastiat, and their peers reminded me how much of their work depends on his. Watching Free to Choose, I thought Friedman claimed limited government, low regulation markets helped the poor as a rhetorical trick to disarm his political opponents. Reading Smith I conclude he wasn’t making those claims to trick, but he probably genuinely believed them.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much Smith’s work supported the strategy I concluded as necessary in my book: requiring government protect life, liberty, and property by disallowing polluting and depleting. I shouldn’t have been surprised since I came to that conclusion in part from Friedman, Hayek, Bastiat, and their peers.

As usual, I followed up this work with more reading, watching, and research, including some of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I summarized some of what I found in Monday’s post Adam Smith and pollution.

This work wasn’t comprehensive enough for me to conclude anything definitively, but Smith seems to convolve opulence and quality of life, but they don’t always correlate and often oppose each other. He treats cultures I call in my book “Sustainable Free Abundant” as living worse lives. Many people would call them indigenous (read my book for the distinctions, which readers have already written me to say they appreciate). My research shows otherwise, that people in Sustainable Free Abundant choose theirs over what Smith promotes.

I may be stating the obvious, but Smith got many things right, but many things wrong. I think many of his fans today discount or don’t realize how much and how significant the wrong parts are at times.

Still, I think if more people understood his work, especially those who criticize him, there would be less conflict over economics. Actually, also those who adore him too so they could be more sober about him.

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