What do You think about On The Wealth Of Nations (2006)?
Read because after his Eat the Rich I could not believe PJ was really that witless. Well, it turns out he’s not, he can write competently enough, although not without gratuitous jabs: "Even intellectuals should have no trouble understanding Smith’s ideas.” In this On the Wealth of Nations he wants to mould Adam Smith into an archetype for the 21st-century compassionate free-market libertarian. It's not a long book, but it is still just dull, and in setting up his hero as a present-day model, PJ makes a giant category error.Smith lived from 1723-1790. Now, some aspects of the 18th Century translate almost seamlessly into our own times. Music must be the prime experience that we still appreciate without making any allowances at all for that age; religious tolerance and dress likewise seem to resonate very well with today’s ideas and concepts. But economics? Consider that in the 18th century: * Governance was based on hereditary ownership of gobs of land, * Asset Transfers involved matrimony or smallish wars, * Corporations were not yet Persons, * The Oil Sector prospected with harpoons and flensing knives, * Offshore Investment was marked X on a pirate map, * and the number of Multinationals was: 1 (the East India Company, but what a rapacious one it was).In short, the economic past is a foreign country; they did things differently there.So from this alien economic landscape PJ attempts to extract a modern spiritual, not just economic, guide. It just doesn’t work. And it is frankly a little embarrassing to watch the contortions he has to go through to make his hero into a millennial libertarian. Needless to say I did not finish this, although I think I am finished with PJ O’Rourke.
—Will
"The man of System...is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; as is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it..He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess board." TMS (A.Smith) pg 232P.J. Comments on the above quote from Smith. "Barbwire always seems to be needed to keep the chessmen on their squares." Most of the chapters deal with the subject matter of each part of the Wealth of Nations, adding a few more chapters on the inquiry of the book, info. about Smith, background of the times, and some general info. on The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Reading economics is not always a pleasureful task but the funny and pithy way in which PJO sets it up, helps me feel more assured of conquering Adam Smiths foundational text.
—Brian
To style this work as a commentary and then to impart no actual information (and to obscure any possible edification via the excerpted and cited original work) would be bad enough; but to approach the work from so heavy a bias, and then to judge Adam Smith's efforts on a pass/fail basis according to that worldview is of no more value than the eructation of a roach.Mr O'Rourke was unable to refrain from his (to him) pithy bon mots long enough to allow any sort of coherency to appear in his work. It was occasionally amusing to see a 2006-vintage Libertarian trumpet about the inevitable triumph of financial market deregulation (about to lead us all on to greater wealth). But even that was not enough to de-embitter the taste of P.J.'s presumption at literally making lists, such as (paraphrased): 'Here Adam Smith conformed with the Cato Institute's lobbying policy, and thus he was very enlightened'; and 'But here Adam Smith thought that labor-value is a thing, and didn't know that we and Fox News would prefer the Austrian School of so-called-economists, and so he was obviously very dense.'To so willfully misunderstand the milieu and intents of Adam Smith is quite discouraging in one who is supposed to write a meaningful work about him. What else is a blindered demagogue to do, though? When the Free Market Fetishist finds that his bible does not in fact prefigure his narrow view--well: panic and obdurance must ensue if the small mind at the helm is unable or unwilling to expand.If one has a chance to read P.J.'s book or a similar commentary penned by a warm bucket of spit--prefer the latter. On a happier note, Nicholas Phillipson's "Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life" is so much more obviously better and worthy of one's time that I will refer all questioners to that tome until further notice.
—Rob
