Adam Smith is commonly awarded his place in the pantheon of economic thinkers as the champion of what he called “perfect liberty,” a free competitive economy. But from our perspective he did more than espouse an economic doctrine. He lifted the vision of European man to a new scene. He saw economic well-being not as the possession of treasure but as a process. Just as Copernicus and Galileo helped raise men above the commonsense fact that the sun circulated the earth, so Adam Smith helped his generation rise above the specious proposition that a nation’s wealth consisted of its gold and
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