ZadekpediaAdam Smith is invoked throughout The Bob Zadek Show as the founder of economics and the theorist of the market order.
The founder of economics
In a 2016 episode with Skipper Young, author of The Wisdom of 76, Bob Zadek’s guest calls The Wealth of Nations the first great economics book and says Adam Smith is to economics what George Washington is to the nation: the founder. Young dates its publication to the 9th of March, placing it in the same year as Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence, and argues that two new worlds were born in that year. He is careful to say Smith did not invent capitalism, which Young suspects is innate in human beings, but that Smith saw it and saw how governments could lessen their activities and let people be freer Skip Young on The Wisdom of 76: Young America’s Way to Wealth (2016).
Young’s central claim is about wealth creation. Before Smith’s book, he says, if one person got richer someone else usually got poorer, and if a nation got richer another nation usually got poorer — close to a zero-sum game. Zadek restates the point: socialists and others who do not subscribe to a free market behave as if wealth is finite and must be moved around politically, whereas Smith saw no need to take wealth from one and give it to another, believing that if humans are left alone they will create wealth. Young credits Smith with showing for the first time how nations and their people could become ever wealthier, and says no one has given the world greater wealth Skip Young on The Wisdom of 76: Young America’s Way to Wealth (2016).
The invisible hand and self-interest
Zadek opens a 2013 episode on tax-driven migration by calling the country’s founding principle freedom, glossing Milton Friedman’s formulation that freedom means the freedom to choose, and then turning to Smith: as Adam Smith put it, “the invisible hand of the market.” In Zadek’s account that hand sets prices and determines desirability, and the pricing mechanism — the product of millions of individual decisions — is a better predictor of what something is worth than a dictate from Washington, Sacramento or Albany Where is Everyone Going? (2013).
In a 2015 episode with John Allison, then CEO of the Cato Institute, Zadek calls the butcher-brewer-baker passage his favorite Adam Smith quote and reads it aloud: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Zadek draws the lesson that only when people are motivated by self-interest do all of us collectively benefit, through voluntary exchange and the freedom to make decisions about one’s own property and life John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015). The quotation is Zadek’s; Allison’s own remarks in the excerpt concern human flourishing, self-esteem and integrity rather than Smith.
Markets against central direction
A 2019 episode with Clif Ross, on Hugo Chávez, gives Smith a structural role. Ross, describing what turned him toward markets, cites Karl Polanyi’s claim that there are about three ways to organize production and distribution: a democratic market, which he says Adam Smith conceived and theorized; redistribution by a headman, which he calls socialism; and reciprocity, which works only in small bands. Reciprocity fails at the scale of cities, states and a world of seven billion people, and turning everything over to the headman means the village trusts him to be ethical and responsible. Ross says Smith describes the alternative in The Wealth of Nations very well, and that the problem of corruption and concentrated power afflicted Chávez and Maduro as it has all socialist projects Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019).
Smithian policy and small business
In a 2020 episode, Robert C. Wright tells Zadek that small businesses operate in highly competitive markets and are therefore in the business of pleasing consumers — producing what they want, when they want it, at a competitive price. Wright calls that the essence of Adam Smithian market economies and says it is what makes the U.S. economy great. He adds that small businesses call for the same public policies Smith called for, which Wright frames as peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: peace abroad and internally, taxes that are low and not onerous to figure out, and enough justice to balance the right of peaceful assembly against the right to own property, including businesses, without violent assault. Wright contrasts this with big business rent-seeking through government largesse, or crony capitalism The Decline of American Independence (2020).
Across episodes
Smith is mentioned in five episodes spanning 2013 to 2020 — the migration episode, the Allison interview, the Young interview, the Chávez episode and the Wright interview — but the episodes show no development in the treatment: each invokes him as a settled authority for free markets, and none of the later excerpts engages or revises the earlier ones.