Today I’m burdening you with a longer-than-usual post — one that’s not about Trump, or his war, or Jeffrey Epstein, or even American politics. It’s about something more powerful than any of these things: an idea.

An idea that many people fundamentally misunderstand. 

Not only did America declare its independence from Britain 250 years ago, but the man presumed to be the father of conservative economics published his opus, The Wealth of Nations, 250 years ago this month. 

It, too, was revolutionary. 

Adam Smith’s masterpiece is one of those rare classics that almost everyone knows about, many people quote from, but a very few have actually read. Yet it ranged over issues as fresh and topical now as they were in the late 18th century — jobs, wages, politics, government, trade, education, business, and ethics. 

And it was hardly conservative, then or now. 

Smith was no “economist” as we now define that specialty, and he didn’t write in complicated, mathematically infected jargon understandable only to fellow specialists. He called himself a “moral philosopher” intent on explaining why people and societies function the way they do, and also how they should function. 

He wrote for the broad public in a style that’s still clear — often witty; rich with digressions into history, religion, and then current affairs like the “disturbances” in the American colonies; and full of vivid illustrations and metaphors to make his points.

The time in which Adam Smith lived was bursting with the consequences of a very big new idea. The old order of church and royal prerogative was giving over to the revolutionary concept that societies existed for the people who lived within them. 

It’s no accident that An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (a title usually shortened to The Wealth of Nations) appeared the same year that Americans declared themselves free and independent citizens, with a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

The leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, as this age is now called, assumed that individuals would naturally and inevitably strive to make better lives for themselves, to maximize their own satisfaction and happiness. 

This didn’t mean that people were selfish or that they had no use for patriotism or religion. It meant simply that their basic motive was to improve their lot in life. It followed that a good society was one that allowed its citizens to do so.

Adam Smith’s ideas fit perfectly with this new democratic idea. To him, the “wealth” of a nation wasn’t determined by the size of its monarch’s treasure or the amount of gold and silver in its vaults, nor by the spiritual worthiness of its people in the eyes of the Church. 

A nation’s wealth was to be judged by the total value of all the goods its people produced for all its people to consume. To a reader in the 21st century, this assertion may seem obvious. At the time he argued it, it was a........

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