 We have many distinguished scholars at the Cato Institute. Scholars in constitutional studies, economics, foreign policy, education. But perhaps our most distinguished scholar, at least if we can agree that it depends on what the meaning of distinguished is, is our H.L. Minkin Research Fellow, P.J. O'Rourke. I've sort of grown up with P.J. when I was in college. The most popular magazine on campus was National Lampoon, which he edited. And I remember quite a few funny bits from it, but I can't repeat any of them today because they all involve drug use, ethnic stereotypes, or gender relations. And they're all forbidden today. He then moved on to Rolling Stone, where he was the foreign affairs desk chief, which was totally cool because they paid him to travel wherever he wanted, though it was never exactly clear to me why he wanted to travel to places like Beirut and Jim and Tammy Baker's retirement village. Now, as we both move out of the rock and roll stage and into the age of sober reflection, he's a correspondent for the Soberist magazine in America, The Atlantic Monthly. And in there, he writes soberly about Medicare reform, social security reform, campaign finance reform, and other adult topics. By my count, P.J. is the author of 13 books, including Holidays in Hell, Republican Party Reptile, Parliament of Whores, All the Trouble in the World, and Eat the Rich. He's one of the funniest writers around. But what people miss when they talk about how funny he is is what a good reporter and what an insightful analyst he is. Parliament of Whores is a very funny book, but it's also a very perceptive analysis of politics around the turn of the century in a modern democracy. And if you read Eat the Rich, you'll learn more about how countries get rich and why they don't than in a whole year of econ at most colleges. In fact, I'm frequently asked, you know, what book should I give my son? What book should I recommend? What book should I buy for a library? And I really have come to think that the first book to read about economics is Eat the Rich because it is fun to read, but you really do learn the basic principles of why countries get rich and why they don't. His Rolling Stone article on the issue of drug legalization a few years ago had a lot of good reporting mixed in with the raucous jokes, and his conclusions might surprise you if you could figure out what they were. In his latest book, instead of visiting Baghdad or China, though in fact he just did that and wrote about it in Forbes FYI recently, he sat down in his study with Adam Smith, and now he's published a short introduction to one of the great books of the Western world, which you'd never actually want to read, The Wealth of Nations. The Wealth of Nations was already written. The new book is called On the Wealth of Nations. So 900 dense pages or 200 pages with big margins, Adam Smith or PJ O'Rourke, You Be the Judge. It's a pleasure to introduce the H. L. Makin Research Fellow of the Cato Institute, PJ O'Rourke. Yeah, this was a bit of a, you know, throwing me into the deep end of the intellectual pool where I am not accustomed to swim. Atlantic Monthly Press has been my publisher forever, and they have this set of small volumes called Books that change the world. It's kind of a, it's like those idiot guides too, you know, or dummies, except not for idiots for you folks. And they asked me to do one of these. So the whole series, it's a series, it's informed commentaries on the Bible, the Koran, the origin of species, Das Kapital, et cetera. Now, the idea that Atlantic had here was, is no one reads these great books anymore, and no one is ever going to read them again. Let's face it, because, I mean, with the advent of television, we entered the post-literate age, and now we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, we've got the internet and Google and Wikipedia. We've now entered the post-intelligent age, as far as I can tell. I mean, we will live to see the day when a cultivated and learned person is spoken of as being well-blogged. So Atlantic had this clever idea, which is to tell us what we would have read in the great books if we'd read them, and then to tell us what we would have thought about what we would have read if we did any thinking. So, in fact, though, actually, the idea, these books that changed the world, they are supposed to be also of some value to people who have actually read The Wealth of Nations. And I think all of the people that have read The Wealth of Nations are probably in this room tonight. So Atlantic had a clever idea. Now, how clever they were to ask me to do the book about Wealth of Nations? I am not so sure. I guess they were kind of brainstorming. They were trying to think about how they could present important concepts to a 21st century that is obsessed with trivial concepts, and they thought to themselves, well, nobody can make things as trivial as PJ can, and so we'll ask him. And I needed the money. And so I sat down and I loaded my lap with this case of Scotch weight of Adam Smith's opus, and I cracked it open to page one of so very, very, very many pages. And what this did was it brought up a fundamental intellectual quandary, a very important intellectual question that I call the quantity query. Why is The Wealth of Nations so damn long? I mean, it's an important question about great books. We've all faced a quantity query. I mean, very often late at night, right before an exam, we've faced that one. I think even a devout biblical literalist studying at a conservative Baptist seminary has got to face that question about Midway through the Begats in First Chronicle. He's got to be wondering, what am I doing with this thing? Now, I have been told that one of the pleasures of middle age is that you get to read the classics again. It's been 40 years since I was in college. I've forgotten all about these things, and you get to read them anew. And I found indeed that there were all sorts of unremembered wonders in The Wealth of Nations, primarily my wondering whether I had ever actually read any of it back when I was supposed to have been reading it. I mean, was it The Wealth of Nations that I'd forgotten, or was it The Wealth of Nations Cliff Notes that I had forgotten? I have no idea. However, there's another pleasure, another pleasure to middle age, and that is as the face reddens more with rum blossoms, it reddens less with embarrassment. And I am now of an age where I am not embarrassed to ask why the hell is The Wealth of Nations so damn long. I wouldn't have had the guts to do that when I was in college. I mean, imagine being a graduate student in a seminar on George Elliott and ever getting up the nerve to say to the professor, why is middle March so damn long? But no, I can do that. And interestingly, one of the main reasons for Adam Smith's lack of economy with words was economic. See, when Wealth was published, it sold for one pound 16 shillings. And the average wage at the time in 1776 when Wealth of Nations was published was 10 shillings a week. See, consumers demand good weight. I mean, even wealthy consumers of intellectual luxury goods, I'll give you an example. I mean, pick up Bill Clinton's autobiography, right? Now that could have been summed up in a few choice words, you know, and weighs pounds. And as a matter of fact, Cato did just that for Adam Smith. Cato's Libertarian Reader, edited by David, makes all of Adam Smith's essential economic points in just seven and a half pages of excerpts from The Wealth of Nations. And there's a kind of interesting story about that. It was Tom Palmer, I believe, who picked out the seven and a half pages that are used in Libertarian Reader. And David is putting together the reader. And when he's done putting it together, he sits down and he's writing an introduction to the Libertarian Reader. And he writes one of those little comments to the effect of that all the original works from which these excerpts have drawn can be enjoyed in their entirety. And Tom seizes and he rushes into David's office and he says, no, not the Wealth of Nations. It cannot be enjoyed in its entirety. See, the problem was that the problem that Smith faced was that his genius was to establish economics as a scientific discipline that was distinct from the unruly jumble of the mental and material world that we encounter anytime we actually do anything that's economic. But it just doesn't take much of any kind of economic encounter to bring all the other scientific disciplines jumbling down on our heads. I mean, if you consider the psychology, the sociology, the political science, and indeed the mechanical engineering that are involved when I discovered that my five year old has left Walmart with an unpaid for my little pony, you know. And see, Adam Smith was willing, he was willing to dive right in to, he was as willing as my crying child and I are to stray from strictly economic points. For example, here is Smith. Here is Smith 231 years ahead of himself explaining why Angelina Jolie makes a discredible amount of money. Smith said, there are some very agreeable and beautiful talents of which the possession commands a certain sort of admiration, but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered as a sort of public prostitution. The exorbitant rewards of players, opera singers, opera dancers, et cetera, are founded upon the rarity and beauty of the talents and the discredit of employing them. Now that is the sort of thing that makes the 800 and 92 and a half pages of the wealth of nations that aren't in the libertarian reader worth reading, or some of them. I mean, Tom Palmer was not wrong. There is, for instance, Smith's 67-page digression concerning the variations in the value of silver during the course of the last four centuries and getting through that. That was like reading modern maturity in Urdu. You see, the Enlightenment was blessed with a very clear prose style, I'm glad to say, clear but digressive. 18th century writers, they thought of digressions the way that 21st century moms with careers think of multitasking. Plus, the pace of reading was a lot slower in the 18th century and there wasn't much on TV. So the whole thing was, you know, they really didn't mind length and the wealth of nations was going to be long no matter what because the Enlightenment takes its name from what in retrospect was a sort of cartoon moment in intellectual history. I mean, light bulbs, except they didn't have light bulbs, light bulbs went on over the heads of all these people like Adam Smith. They had a sudden realization that the physical world was not some divine obscurity that was apprehendable only through prayer and monkish meditation. In other words, they realized that not looking at things was not the best way of looking at things. See, if you illuminated the machinery of nature with a little observation and a little thought, you could see how things work. The universe was explicable and Enlightenment thinkers were prime mover, damn it, going to explain no matter how long it took them. Now, all explanations start out brief, but pretty soon, you know, Smith gets, he gets a meshed in clarification. So he gets intellectually caught out kind of kind of Dagwood-like carrying his shoes up the stairs of exegesis at 3 a.m., expounding his head off while the vexed and quarrelous spouse, the reader, stands with arms crossed and slipper tapping on the second floor landing of comprehension. Now, nonetheless, there is this core of simplicity to the wealth of nations. I mean, what Adam Smith did was he illuminated the mystery of economics, and you still hear people talk about the mystery of economics. The mystery of economics. Well, Smith illuminated it and enlightened it. One flash, he said, consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production. There is no mystery to economics. Smith took the meta out of the physics. I mean, economics, it's our livelihood, and that is all that it is. And so the wealth of nations argues that there are three basic principles. It's three basic principles, and it argues them with plain thinking and with plentiful examples, very, very plentiful examples, unfortunately, and it proves them. It proves them. I mean, even intellectuals should have no trouble understanding Smith's ideas. Economic progress depends upon a trinity of individual freedoms, of individual prerogatives, the pursuit of self-interest, the division of labor, and freedom of trade. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of self-interest. That was Smith's most brilliant insight. Now, to a 21st century audience, this hardly sounds like news, or rather it sounds like everything that's in the news. I mean, because these days, altruism itself is proclaimed at the top of the altruist lungs. I mean, it is certainly of interest to the self to be a celebrity, and Bob Geldorf has found a way to remain one. But for most of mankind's history, it was the wisdom of philosophy and the teachings of religion. They held that individuals ought to subjugate their egos, ought to bridle their ambitions. They ought to sacrifice themselves. And per Abraham and Isaac, they ought to sacrifice their family members if they could catch them. And there was a reason for this. There was a reason that philosophy and religion taught us to seek the meek. And it was quite straightforward. Most people, in those days, had no control over their material circumstances at all. In fact, if they were slaves or serfs, and most of them were, they had no control over their material selves. I mean, in the doghouse of the ancient and medieval world, aestheticism made us feel less like dogs. However, Smith was living at a time and in a place where ordinary people were beginning to have some power to pursue their own self-interest. And this made Smith say, using a tone that was very close to the tone of modern irony, it caused Smith to say, is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people? Is it to be regarded as an advantage or an inconvenience to society? I mean, in the 18th century, prosperity was not yet considered a self-evidently good thing for poor people. And the reason was nobody had ever asked those poor people. And in a lot of places in the world, nobody has asked those poor people yet to this day. I mean, Smith was pointing out that it is not a question of religious sacrilege. It is not a question of philosophical folly to better our circumstances. The question is how to do it. And the answer is division of labor, what we would call specialization. Obvious answer, it's an obvious answer, except to most of the scholars who had theorized about economics before Adam Smith. I mean, division of labor has existed since mankind has. I mean, when the original Adam delved and his Eve span, I mean, the division of labor might be said to have been painfully obvious. I mean, women endured the agonies of childbirth while men fiddled around the garden. Now, the Adam I'm talking about, he was not the first philosopher to notice specialization or to see that division of labor is as innate as labor is. But Adam Smith was the first person to truly understand how vital, how important that division of labor is. In fact, he seems to have invented the term division of labor. See, the little fellow, the little fellow with the big ideas chips the spear points, and the courageous oaf spears the mammoth. And the artistic type does a lovely cave painting of it all. One person makes a thing, another person makes another thing, and then everybody wants everything. So they trade. Now, trade may be theoretically good or self sufficiency may be theoretically better. But to even think about theories like that, it is a waste of that intermittently useful specialization called thought. Trade is just an absolute fact. And Smith saw in his other brilliant insight that all trades, when they are freely conducted, all trades are mutually beneficial by definition. Now, a person with this got that, which he wanted more from a person who wanted this more than that. I mean, it may have been a stupid trade. Viewing a cave painting cannot be worth 300 pounds of mammoth ham. The mutuality may be lopsided. A starving artist gorges himself for months while a courageous oaf of a new art patron stands scratching his head in a paleolithic grotto. And we can imagine that that wily spearpoint chipper took his mammoth slice along the way. But, you know, they didn't ask us. It is none of our business what trades they make. Unless, of course, unless we make it our business by introducing restraints on trade. And, you know, a restraint on trade, it doesn't merit the name restraint unless there is coercion involved. And I will give you an example of a coercive trade. A coercive trade is this. A coercive trade is when I get the spearpoints and the mammoth meat and the cave paintings and the cave and what you get is killed. That is a coercive trade. That is a trade restraint. Now, coercion, simply the lack of individual freedom, the lack of individual prerogatives, coercion destroys the mutually beneficial nature of trade, which destroys the trading, which destroys the division of labor, which destroys progress. Now, Smith, with this logical demonstration of how productivity is increased, what he did was he disproved that horrible idea, which is still dearly held by all leftists and also by everybody's little brother, that bettering the condition of one person necessarily worsens the condition of somebody else. But wealth is not like that. Wealth is not a pizza. If you have too many slices, I don't have to eat the dominoes box. And wealth is not zero sum. Now, if wealth can be increased, if there's no set fixed amount of wealth, then a nation cannot be said to have some sort of set fixed horde of treasure. The wealth of a nation, the wealth of a nation, it has to be measured by the volume of trades and goods and services. It has to be measured by what goes on in the castle's kitchens and stables and not measured by what is locked up in the strong boxes in the castle's tower. Now, Smith specified this measurement right in the first sentence of his introduction to the wealth of nations. He said, the annual labor of every nation is the fund which supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences with which it is annually consumes. So what Smith did there, just in one stroke, he created the concept of gross domestic product. Now, without GDP, economists would be left with nothing to say. I mean, they'd be left standing around mute and ugly neckties waiting for MSNBC to ask them to be silent on the air. So if wealth is all ebb and flow, then so is the measure of wealth, money. Money has no intrinsic value. Another great Smith insight. Now, any baby who's eaten a nickel could tell you that money has no intrinsic value. And those of us who are old enough to have heard of the Weimar Republic or to have lived through the Carter administration, we're not peened by the information that money has no intrinsic value. But in the 18th century, money was still mostly precious metals. And Smith's observation about money, it must have been a little disheartening to a lot of his readers. Even though they knew, they knew. I mean, because they had the example of impoverished but bling deluged Spain sitting right there in front of them to show that money had, you know, I mean, gold is, well, it's worth its weight in gold. Yes, definitely. But it's not necessarily worth anything else. And it was almost as though, as I can say a little disheartening, it was almost as though Smith, having proved that we could all have more money, then proved that money doesn't buy happiness. And it doesn't, it rents it. So the wealth of nations is published with this, with a very nice coincidence in the same year, 1776, that the greatest capitalist country in the history of mankind declares its independence. And now contrary to what is sometimes thought, Smith's work, the Smith's wealth of nations, it did not shock his contemporaries at all. In fact, to the educated people of Great Britain, the idea of the United States of America, that was much more unreasonable, more counterintuitive, more as it were outlandish than anything that Smith had to say. You know, I mean, self-interest, I mean, self-interest makes the world go around. And that was, that had been tacitly acknowledged since the world began going around. You know, I mean, it was a little secret that everybody knows. The idea that money is at root an imaginary thing, that worry had been worried through by David Hume, Smith's best friend, at least a quarter of a century before the wealth of nations. And in fact, the fictitious nature of money had been understood since classical times. I mean, in the 200 years following the reign of the emperor Nero, the silver content of Roman coinage, it went from 100% to zero to absolutely not whatsoever. But even though the wealth of nations didn't really shock people and didn't really surprise them, even though the things that it said were things that they were already beginning to understand of their own accord, still there was something in the wealth of nations that was a kind of grit in the gears of enlightenment thinking. And that grit is still there. I mean, I found it to be still present when I sat down to read the wealth of nations 230 years later. I'm reading about, you know, pursuit of self interest. And I think, well, I'm not greedy. I'm not self interested. I mean, I think about the environment and those less fortunate than me, especially about those unfortunate who don't give a hoot about pollution or global warming or species extinction, I think about them a lot. And I hope they lose the next election because then maybe we can get some caring and compassionate people in public office, people who aren't greedy and selfish. And if we can elect those people who aren't greedy and selfish, those environmentalists, well, then maybe the subdivision full of McMansions is going to block my view of the ocean won't get built, right? And let's face it, let's face it, the lower ranks of the people, they do have too much money. I mean, look at Britney Spears. I mean, that's terrible. You know, I mean, or a better example, those money bags buying those, those shadows to go on the beachfront there. I mean, them with their, their four barge garage and their Martha bitching Stewart kitchen that they cook in about as often as Martha does the dishes, you know, I mean, yeah, yeah, they may think they're not the lower ranks of people because they make a lot of dough, you know, but I, but their lifestyle is an inconvenience to society big time as they will find out when I key their Hummer that's taken up three parking spots. And I mean, these types, all they do is work all day, you know, 80 hundred hours a week in some like specialized something or other that nobody else understands, you know, on, on Wall Street or at a fancy corporate law firm or in an expensive hospital operating room, you know, I mean, you see, a person has to balance, has to, has to balance job and, and life and family to become a balanced person, you know, I mean, and this is why my wife and I, we are, are planning to grow all our own food. Turnips can be stored for a year and to use only fair traded internet services with open code programming. And we're going to heat the house with means of clean energy, renewable resources such as wind power from drafts under the door and, and, and, and we're going to knit our children's clothes with organic wool from sheep raised under humane farming conditions in our yard. And, and this will keep the kids warm and cozy if somewhat itchy and, and it will build their character because they will get teased on the street. Because yeah, okay, okay, you know, total removal of every trade restraint. This would be, this would be good for the economy, good for the economy, but money isn't everything. I mean, think of the danger and damage to society. I mean, without government regulation, you know, without government regulation, the big shots who run corporate corporations like Enron, like WorldCom, like Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions. They could have embezzled all sorts of money, you know, if it hadn't been for government regulation. I mean, you know, without restrictions on the sale of hazardous substances, young people might smoke and drink, even take drugs, you know, without the licensing of medical practitioners. I mean, the way would be clear for chiropractors, osteopaths, purveyors of aromatherapy, who knows what, you know, if we didn't have labor unions, 30,000 people, they'd still be wage slaves at Ford, you know, I mean, their daily lives filled with mindless drudgery, you know, and, and if it weren't for various forms of retail collusion in the petroleum industry, I mean, filling stations, they could charge as little as they, as they liked, you know, and I would have to drive all over town to find the best price, and that would waste gas, you know, so we have to regulate, we absolutely have to regulate, and we also, we have to consider the harm to the developing world, you know, I mean, you cheap pop music, MP3 downloads imported from the United States, they're going to put every nose flute band in Peru out of business. Plus, some jobs just require protection to ensure that they're performed locally in their own communities, my job, just for instance, I mean, my job's to make quips and jests and waggish comments, you know, you know, somewhere in Mumbai, there is a younger, funnier person willing to work for a lot less than me, you know, and my job could be outsourced, you know, it could be outsourced to him, but you know, if that happened, if that happened, he could make any joke he wanted, he could make any joke he wanted, he could let his sense of humor run wild, he could get completely tasteless, he could start making Jerry Ford funeral jokes, you know, about how it went on longer than the Ford administration went on and had more substance. So yeah, who knows what he'd say, you know, and in that case, who would my wife scold, you know, who would my in-laws be offended by, you know, who would my friends shun, you know, if my job gets outsourced, you see, see, for the sake of accountability and all things socially responsible, Adam Smith's flow of goods and services, this needs to be accompanied by another flow, or at least the threat of another flow, namely me getting a drink thrown in my face, you know, I mean, then there's a matter of those goods and services, I mean, Adam Smith's gross domestic product, I'm as grossly domestic as anyone, where's the product, you know, I mean, how come all these goods and services flow out of my income instead of into my income? I mean, of course, I understand that money isn't what's valuable, love is what's valuable, and my bank account is full of love, or something that's closely related to love, such as sex, which is to say I have F all in my bank account. And also, you know, if money isn't that important, what was Alan Greenspan doing all that time, you know, why would he see such a big cheese? I mean, he'd just go in his office and play, you know, Sudoku puzzles all day or what, you know, so. So you see, the thing of it is, at some gut psychological level, at some visceral, feral, you know, place down inside us that we don't want to go to, we just don't take the axioms, none of us take the axioms of Adam Smith as givens, not unless what's given to us are, you know, vast profits and enormous salaries and huge year-end bonuses that result from unfettered markets and productivity growth and current Fed policy. I mean, but, you know, I began to realize when I had gotten all the way through the wealth of nations that the real purpose of the wealth of nations was to keep me from being a crazy person, was to keep me from being out on the street, throwing bricks through the windows of Starbucks because they're not utilizing fair trade coffee that's being grown in sustainable conditions, you know. I mean, it was really all about keeping me from going nuts when Walmart moves into my neighborhood to make me realize that the proper response to Walmart moving into my neighborhood is not for me to get involved in zoning quarrels, not for me to bring lawsuits, not for me to bring land use sort of thing and sign petitions, that if I am upset by Walmart moving into my neighborhood, the proper response is to get Target to build a store next door. That is the proper response. And I, you know, not only did I have to read Adam Smith to really bring that home to me, even though I like to think that I'm a libertarian, but I think I may have to keep re-reading him all 900 pages of it, you know, for the rest of my life. Anyway, that's all I know about the wealth of nations, but if anybody's got any questions, I'll make up some other stuff. We do want to get upstairs so you can all get your books signed, but we'll take a few questions here, raise your hand, wait to be called on, and we'll bring a microphone to you. Wow, that doesn't sound very libertarian to me. That sounds pretty authoritarian and organized. Questions? No questions? Okay, I'm Bob Hershey, I'm a consultant, and I wondered what you found in your studies of wealth of nation that you didn't already know when you wrote Eat the Rich. Yeah, a number of things actually. I'll tell you one thing that looking back on Eat the Rich with that I didn't concentrate on enough was rule of law, rule of law. I didn't really understand how important equality before the law was. I made some mention of it in the book, but Smith is very firm on this. I think the other thing that is important with Adam Smith, and it's not just the wealth of nations, it's also the theory of moral sentiments, the book that comes before, is the moral basis. I mean, of course I knew I was in favor of free markets just because I'm crabbing, I don't like anybody to boss me around, and I'm in favor of free markets because they're more efficient. I've got lots of reasons to be in favor of free markets, but I sometimes tend to lose sight, I think we all sometimes tend to lose sight of the moral ground that if indeed people are to have a qualitative equality with other people to be equal before the law, then everybody has to have an equal prerogative to specialize in their labor to take the job that they want, to trade the products, the fruits of their labor, and to pursue their own self-interest. And every time we make a move to restrict any of those things, we're not just messing around with the economy, we're not just causing people in the inner city to have higher prices because we're not allowing a Walmart in there, we're also impinging upon people's sacred freedoms. And sometimes I think in the pragmatic arguments that we tend to get into in many of our fields to lose sight of the moral importance of what is the libertarian stance. Sir. Thanks. Nice to ask for the Institute of Humane Studies. As you know, there are people who read the theory of moral sentiments often say that his views in there are contradictory to what he says in the wealth of nations because in the theory of moral sentiments he talks about the importance of sympathy for others. Now I think that they are reconcilable, but I wonder how do you reconcile? I heard that argument when I first started to read Adam Smith, I heard that, okay, this guy did these two different things, this theory of moral sentiments, this work of moral philosophy, and then he does this other work. And as a matter of fact, the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is where I always go for certainty because it was the last time that Western man was certain of anything was about 1911 or 12. And they actually argue that position in Encyclopedia Britannica. In fact, this is kind of a snarky article about Smith and Encyclopedia Britannica. And I began to realize, however, that this just was not the case. I mean, Smith had a very large project in mind as a moral philosopher. He intended to write three big books, theory of moral sentiments about how we come to make moral judgments and how we have the ammunition to make those moral judgments and how we can improve our moral judgments. Then there is the wealth of nations, how we can improve our material circumstances. The first one is about our moral circumstances. The second book is about our material circumstances. There was to be a third book, which he called about jurisprudence, which was how we could improve our political circumstances. He didn't write that for a number of reasons, partly because he died. But I also think he got discouraged about that one, because the last book of the wealth of nations, there are five books of wealth of nations, and book five is basically policy advice. It's Adam Smith's policy wonk. It's when he tries to apply his economic theories and to a certain extent his moral theories to the practical problems of politics, and it's titanic right into the iceberg. I mean, politics will turn anyone into an idiot, even a genius like Adam Smith. It is self-contradictory. Some of it's even vaguely sort of cracked sounding. I think, without any evidence, but I just think that Adam Smith realized at some point towards the end of his life, he was a moral philosopher, and that politics has very little place for philosophy and no place for morals. And so book three just wasn't going to get written. But Smith goes on and on in the wealth of nations over and over again about how greed is always short-sighted. Yes, it's true that our economy grows not because of the sympathy and wonderful feelings we have for other people. That's the whole passage about the butcher and the brewer and the baker. Don't do this because they love you. They do it out of the pursuit of their own self-interest. But it also goes on at some length about how we have to live in a kind of society that have laws that respect people as equals and that give equal protection and contract and so on, so that we have to have a kind of material sympathy for each other. We have to have a long-sighted view. And there's nothing that contradicts what he says about morality. He's simply dealing with two different fields of endeavor here. I guess the example I would give is his arguments against slavery. In the theory of moral sentiments, he has an impassioned moral argument against slavery. And it's a good argument, it's a solid argument, and it's an inspiring argument. Then the wealth of nations, there's this rather cold argument against slavery saying, you know, slavery is expensive. Slavery is impractical. Slavery is inefficient. And if you read just that, without having first read the theory of moral sentiments, you'd think, God, this guy's, I mean, he's not wrong, but this is a kind of a cold approach to be taking to this, you know? But he thought you'd read the other book. So he didn't feel that he had to repeat himself about the moral repulsiveness. Yes, yeah. What would Adam Smith, and more importantly, what does the PGA work say about George Bush's war in Iraq? Ah, I'm afraid that probably falls into that jurisprudence book that he didn't write. Yeah, that one's too deep for me. You know, there is one thing that's weird about being in Washington is it's the city of certainty. You know, one thing you never hear in this phrase you never hear in the city is I don't know. You will hear, I don't have any information on that at this time. You occasionally hear that. But you never hear I don't know. And, you know, when it comes to the war in Iraq personally, I don't know. You know, I mean, there are some problems to which there are no solutions, you know, and there are some questions to which there are no good answers. And I fear that that may be one of them. Smith was not a big fan of war, especially when it was conducted for what he thought of as mercantile reasons. I don't think that that's why this war was conducted. A lot of people have said to me, oh, this war is all about oil. I was over when I was over covering the war. I was waiting for the war to start. I was in Kuwait, and I was flying around Kuwait in a Chinook helicopter. And, you know, Kuwait's big. It looks a little on the map, but it's actually the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island put together and it's flat as a patio. And we're out over the Kuwaiti desert. And it is just covered, covered with aircraft and Patriot missile batteries and transport trucks and tanks and artillery pieces and missiles and all this stuff. And the Bivwaks for 160,000 American troops. It's like wall-to-wall war. It's a war from me to the curvature of the earth in every direction. 360 degrees of war. And I looked down on that and I had this little epiphany about the war. And I thought to myself, boy, is it more expensive to steal oil than it is to buy it. So I don't really think the war was about oil. And that was really the wars that Smith was criticizing were mercantile wars. So I'm afraid we're going to have to let the guy recruse himself on that question. All right, one more question, then we're going to go upstairs. Right there. Back there. By the door. Back there. Right. Yes. All right, thank you. If you go another halfway around the world and back to the economics in a little bit, what do you think he would say about China, where we have what appears to be tremendous growth in GNP, GDP, and no freedom? Well, I'm not sure what he would say about that. But I think, you know, Adam Smith lived in a pre-democratic era. Adam Smith was no great fan of democracy. And the reason he was no great fan of democracy was he didn't have any experience of it. Like most 18 educated 18th century people, what he knew about democracy was mainly from the Peloponnesian wars. You know, and I mean, to make a very long story very short, Democratic Athens screwed up, you know. And so in their other experience of democracy besides ancient Athens and its problems, where the, you know, the autocratic city-states in Italy, the Dutch Republic, which was a bit of a national enemy with the Brits, some of the Swiss cantons, but those were the same Swiss cantons that burned people at the stake for not agreeing with Calvin. You know, they didn't have much experience with democracy and what they'd seen hadn't been too pretty. And so they were not, they were great believers in natural law, in common law, in tradition, and in a limited monarchy, and a monarchy, and also in a kind of limited representation of the people. But they hadn't seen, because it didn't exist yet, that an ordinary broad-based democracy could work. So the current government of China wouldn't have been no great shock to Adam Smith. In fact, it would have been more or less power for the course, not as free as the Britain of his day, but not as oppressive as many of the other countries in Europe, let alone, say, Tsarist Russia. So I think that Adam Smith would probably be most impressed by the fact that ordinary people in China were greatly increasing their material well-being, and he would have expected to judge by Book Three, which is a history of economic development in Western Europe, by Book Three and Wealth of Nations, he would have expected these people in due time to have a, to acquire the political clout that naturally comes with increased material clout. Of course, again, another area Adam Smith was inexperienced in was what he had never seen anything the like of was totalitarianism. He did not, he was very familiar with despotism and with authoritarianism, but the machinery for totalitarianism and the ideology that went behind things like communism and fascism, had barely begun to bud in his day, and there was no example of that for him to, so he wouldn't have been able to say, he wouldn't have critiqued the communist party in China quite the same way we would have because he wouldn't have had that, that experience.