Setting that aside, Friedman’s frequent invocation of Adam Smith raises a fundamental question, relevant to the entire Chicago school: who made Adam Smith God? Friedman quotes Smith as if he had proved a system of natural laws, and therefore one need only offer an apt quotation to bulletproof any point. But what, exactly, does a quotation from Adam Smith demonstrate? Like most Enlightenment philosophes, Smith believed in a natural order, but The Wealth of Nations is a treatise, not a statement of the results of scientific investigation.
