“Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics,”

— Barack Obama

2013, Remarks on Economic Mobility (December 2013)
Context: It was Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, who once said, “They who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” And for those of you who don’t speak old-English let me translate. It means if you work hard, you should make a decent living. If you work hard, you should be able to support a family.

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44th President of the United States of America 1961

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“I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. xxi

“Adam Smith is, of course, justly lauded for his advocacy of free markets and limited government. Particularly famous is his idea that each person’s pursuit of self-interest leads, as if by an invisible hand, to socially efficient outcomes.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

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“The entire thrust of neoclassical thought is to argue that the free market economy is an efficient system that will optimize utility for all mankind, if only government will get out of the way. It therefore departs from classical economists such as Adam Smith, who recognized the importance of governments for regulating markets and preventing monopolies.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 9, Square Versus Oblong, p. 284

“From Adam Smith through John Maynard Keynes, economics had been mostly talk. At Harvard economics was talk. At MIT, Samuelson made it math.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

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Fortune's Formula (2005)

“The economic doctrine of Adam Smith is the doctrine of Mandeville set out in a form which is no longer paradoxical and literary, but rational and scientific.”

Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) Anglo-Dutch writer and physician

La doctrine économique d'Adam Smith, c'est la doctrine de Mandeville, exposée sous une forme non plus paradoxale et littéraire, mais rationnelle et scientifique.
Élie Halévy La formation du radicalisme philosophique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1901-4) vol. 1, p. 162; Mary Morris (trans.) The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (Clifton, N.J.: A. M. Kelley, 1972) p. 90.
Criticism

“The phrase laissez-faire is not to be found in the works of Adam Smith, of Ricardo, or of Malthus. Even the idea is not present in a dogmatic form in any of these authors. Adam Smith, of course, was a Free Trader and an opponent of many eighteenth-century restrictions on trade. But his attitude towards the Navigation Acts and the usury laws shows that he was not dogmatic. Even his famous passage about 'the invisible hand' reflects the philosophy which we associate with Paley rather than the economic dogma of laissez-faire.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Source: Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 2

“Hitler was ‘an enemy of free-market economics’ and a ‘reluctant dirigiste.”

Richard Overy (1947) British historian

Source: War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994), pp. 1–2

“If I were five-and-twenty or thirty, instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would take Adam Smith in hand—I would not go beyond him, I would have no politics in it—I would take Adam Smith in hand, and I would have a League for free trade in Land just as we had a League for free trade in Corn. You will find just the same authority in Adam Smith for the one as for the other; and if it were only taken up as it must be taken up to succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical, Chartist notion, but taken up on politico-economic grounds, the agitation would be certain to succeed; and if you apply free trade in land and to labour too—that is, by getting rid of those abominable restrictions in your parish settlements, and the like—then, I say, the men who do that will have done for England probably more than we have been able to do by making free trade in corn.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech at Rochdale (23 November 1864), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume II (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 493.
1860s

“Ricardo's "science" was founded on the principle that capital is more or less immobile and labor highly mobile. We are enjoined today to worship the consequences of Ricardo's science, despite the fact that the assumptions on which they are based have been reversed: capital is highly mobile, and labor virtually immobile -- libertarian conservatives lead the way in rejecting Adam Smith's principle that "free circulation of labor" is a cornerstone of free trade, in keeping with their contempt for markets”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

except for the weak <br class="br">Z Magazine, February 1995 http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199505--.htm. <br class="br">Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999

“The Mercantile System still had a certain artless Catholic candour and did not in the least conceal the immoral nature of trade. … But when the economic Luther, Adam Smith, criticised past economics things had changed considerably. … Protestant hypocrisy took the place of Catholic candour.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Das Merkantilsystem hatte noch eine gewisse unbefangene, katholische Geradheit und verdeckte das unsittliche Wesen des Handels nicht im mindesten. ... Als aber der ökonomische Luther, Adam Smith, die bisherige Ökonomie kritisierte, hatten sich die Sachen sehr geändert. ... An die Stelle der katholischen Geradheit trat protestantische Gleisnerei.
Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844)

“Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics,”

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