America’s blowout Fourth of July was not the only semiquincentennial of 2026. “The Wealth of Nations,” too, turned 250, James Grant writes in the Journal’s Bookshelf, and the old pages still deserve turning. Socialism is on the wing, crony capitalism is in the news, freedom needs a friend, and Adam Smith — in Grant’s phrase — is Johnny-on-the-spot.
It helps that Smith was not an economist in the present sense. He wrote well, if slowly; the book was 27 years in the making. He used none of the jargon or mathematics that today render the deliberations of the doctors of economics unintelligible to anyone but a fellow adept. “He never moved above the heads of even the dullest readers,” Joseph Schumpeter noted, meaning it kindly.
The man
By turns a Glasgow professor (moral philosophy, semantics, rhetoric, logic, jurisprudence, the history of astronomy — no division of labor for the geniuses of that era), a traveling tutor to a young duke, and a long-serving government customs commissioner. For three years accompanying the Duke of Buccleuch on his Continental tour, Smith received a lifetime pension of £300 a year. Of such solid stuff was the pound sterling made, Grant observes, that nobody seems to have asked for an inflation-escalator clause.
Read that sentence twice if you are retiring on a fixed pension. Smith’s held its value for the rest of his life because the currency did. Yours is a bet on the same thing, and the bet is no longer free.
The two lessons
On debt. Smith and his friend David Hume did not agree on every economic proposition, but they independently condemned what Grant calls the canker of the public debt. “When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree,” Smith wrote, “there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid.” Hume, asked how much was too much, refused to name a figure and told the story of the French astrologers who predicted the death of Henry IV every year: “These fellows must be right at last.” And if the debt should finally sink the public credit, Smith prescribed an open and avowed national bankruptcy rather than the treacherous debasement of the coin of the realm.
We will let readers draw the line from that paragraph to a week in which the ten-year Treasury closed at 4.737% and the Treasury Secretary’s buybacks failed to hold it down. Smith would have understood the absorption premium. He would have called it by a shorter name.
On the invisible hand. The resounding sentence: “The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations.” He devoted nearly a fifth of the book to attacking mercantilism — the quack system that maximized exports and minimized imports for the empty prize of a trade surplus, enriching producers at consumers’ expense while impoverishing the nation. Britain was Exhibit A. The reader may supply Exhibit B.
What he did not invent
Grant is fair about this. Smith no more sired economics than Abner Doubleday invented baseball; Murray Rothbard wrote a book apportioning the credit to the Greeks, Aquinas, the Spanish scholastics, Cantillon and Turgot. Schumpeter’s verdict was that the book does not contain a single analytic idea that was entirely new in 1776 — “it is a great performance all the same.” What Smith did was unite the pieces into a vision of human flourishing, written in prose a customs commissioner could follow.
That is the house’s ambition on a smaller scale: say the true thing plainly, to the dullest reader, without moving above anyone’s head. Smith managed it for 976 pages, including a 71-page detour on the variations in the value of silver and a statistical appendix on wasteful subsidies to Scottish herring exporters. We will settle for a page a day. Happy 250th.