Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have been born in what is often still referred to as the Western World (Europe and North America) rarely appreciate the historical uniqueness of our material and related cultural well ...
Adam Smith’s central contribution to economic understanding was surely his demonstration that under an institutional arrangement of individual liberty, property rights, and voluntary exchange the self-interested conduct of market participants could be shown to be consistent with a general ...
Much of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is an attack on mercantilism.
Adam Smith is, without doubt, the most famous member of that group of Scottish Moral Philosophers ...
David Hume was one of the most prominent of the Scottish Moral Philosophers. He is particularly famous as a philosophical skeptic, who, in his book, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), questioned whether man’s reason and reasoning ability could ...
One of the most cherished misunderstandings, if not delusions, of the social engineer – the individual who would presume to attempt to remake society through conscious and planned design – is the confident belief that he (and those like ...
This time of the year, whether in good economic times or bad, is when we gather with our family and friends and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal together. It marks a remembrance of those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the ...
Scotland would seem a strange place for the emergence of center of intellectual development that would influence the stream of ideas throughout the world. Scotland had been unified with England near the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was ...
One of the major turning points in social and economic understanding emerged in the 1700s with the theory of social order without human design. Before the eighteenth century, most social theory presumed or took as a working assumption that ...
Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting inflations ...
In the middle decades of the eighteenth century two schools of thought emerged, one in France and the other in Great Britain that were critical of Mercantilism, the government system of economic planning and regulation in the 1700s. ...
