I recently delivered a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s second-best book: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

The year 1776 was a momentous one for many reasons. It saw the installation of James Watt’s first steam engine, the recognition of Captain Cook by the Royal Society for his work in preventing scurvy and his departure on his final and ultimately fatal voyage. It witnessed the publication of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

It also saw one of the whiniest publications in history, a tedious sob story called the Declaration of Independence, in which a collection of colonial real-estate speculators, no longer at risk from the Spanish or French, confected a litany of spurious grievances they claimed to have suffered at the hands of the British Crown largely to advance their own narrow financial ambitions.

Seen through the lens of pecuniary self-interest, the real........

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