Adam Smith was a Scottish professor of moral philosophy He published his classic The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the year the American Revolution began Smith became widely known for his ideas of free markets, laissez faire commerce, and the invisible hand Yet English politicians, landed gentry, and the nobility paid little attention and enacted none of Smith s suggested reforms.The American colonies, however, began their existence as an independent nation in 1781 with no money, no industry, no banks, and deep in debt The Founding Fathers particularly Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin turned to the ideas of Adam Smith to create and jump start an economic system for America with both immediate and long sustained results.This little known but vital part of U.S history is now revealed in Roy C Smith s highly readable new book....
I bought this book after reading Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. It is a great companion to Adam Smith's magnum opus. It provided the context and history that enhanced my understanding of the world in which Adam Smith wrote his great work.
It started in an interesting way and then got lost.
If you want to get into how our country was formed financially you must read this book. The auther is educated in economics and history. It is easy to understand, this should be taught in high school.
Roy C. Smith offers a readable, straight-forward, right-of-center review of the famous economist, Adam Smith. The book introduces Smith's thoughts in basic detail, and spends a great deal of time putting Smith in the context of the American revolution, which of course is when "The Wealth of Nations" was published, in 1776. At times the history seems to drown-out the thems of Adam Smith's contribution, but by the conclusion the author ties up his thesis that Adam Smith's thought had a pervasive and substantial impact on the Founding Fathers, and upon the way Americans have done busness since then. A good read for introductory or undergraduate readers. Author's focus remains on Smith and American context. Little mention of John Maynard Keynes is made, and no discusion of Marx or socialism as a competing alternative. This did not detract from book, as plenty of other books and articles speak to those subjects.
Adam Smith and the Origins of American Enterprise: How the Founding Fathers Turned to a Great Economist's Writings and Created the American Economy has the longest and most promising title relative to its meager contents of the book I have read. It paints a broad-stroke economic history of America from colonial days to the twentieth century and comments periodically on the consistency between Smith's vision and America's successful execution of an economic and political system based on the principle of individual freedom. Mistakes - Adam Smith succeeded his professor at the University of Glasgow (it was Thomas Craigie who did so) and Benjamin Franklin was aware of Smith (they knew each other and it thought Franklin saw chapter drafts of the Wealth of Nations) - makes the reader wonder about other factual declarations in the book. More significantly, the author does not appear to have referred directly to either the Wealth of Nations or the writings of the founding fathers in his research. I was looking for and did not find what our founding fathers actually said about Smith's revolutionary ideas.