THE RETURN OF ADAM SMITH

byGeorge S. Montgomery Jr., '17. The CaxtonPrinters, Ltd., Caldwell, Idaho, 1949; pagesx, 147; $2.50.

As a genuinely liberal device for organizing complicated economic activities, freedom of the market is today probably the least understood and most underrated of all general principles. The basic proposition of Adam Smith is attacked right and left (especially left) by persons who not only have not read "The Wealth of Nations" but seem not even to have read anybody who has read it. Nonsense on the subject is being taught so much faster than economists can teach sense that a leading economist recently suggested the abolition of economics departments as a means of retrenchment in higher education. George Montgomery, who won distinction as a Navy flier not long after his graduation from Dartmouth, has read Adam Smith and understood what he read. His little book, the last 47 pages of which consists in excerpts from "The Wealth of Nations," is a defense of personal freedom, inside and outside the field of economics, and an attack on its enemies. Among his interesting observations is the fact that the appearance of Smith's classic and our Declaration of Independence in the same year was far from being a mere coincidence. England lost her American colonies by persisting in the policy which Smith abhorred: our Revolution was essentially a revolt against the "social control," the "social planning," designed for us by those who insisted that they knew what was "best for the people." One may disagree with some of the author's attack on the oponents of economic liberalism. Yet in the present era of the neo-mercantilistic "welfare state," of "fair" prices which go back to the Middle Ages and farther, one can well afford to read this able and attractive discussion of what a great Liberal was talking about.