Those who plunged the entire world into our current economic difficulties have no right to claim Adam Smith, the so-called “father” of capitalism in eighteenth-century Scotland, as their intellectual and moral father, or so I have argued in three previous columns.

“Two hundred and thirty years ago,” Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser recently declared in the New York Times, “Adam Smith made the case for selfishness when he wrote that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.'”1 (Emphasis mine)

When I suggest that the primary cause of our current economic difficulties is our frequent failure to integrate in theory and practice what Adam Smith (the eighteenth century so-called “father” of capitalism) meant by sympathy and self-interest, I have in mind things like these influential paragraphs that economics Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman published forty years
ago:1

William Kristol, neoconservative leader and Weekly Standard editor, believes that the time has come to rethink capitalism. “It will be important, over the next four years,” he writes in the November 24 edition of his journal, “to fight to save free-market capitalism from the Barack Obama administration.