Adam Smith

The Rise of the Commercial Society: The Business Leader as Hero

April 22, 2013

By Mark Skousen Editor, Forecasts & Strategies Keynote Address at Annual International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education (IACBE), April 18, 2013, Orlando, Florida “It is business that creates wealth, not countries or governments.  It is businesses that decide how well or poorly off we are.”   —Shlomo Maital, MIT managerial professor Tomorrow my wife Jo Ann [...]

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Roger Garrison and I with the Totem Pole of Economics

August 19, 2012

Roger Garrison visited me last week at my home in New York during the Austrian economics seminar at FEE. The Totem Pole of Economics Click here for the story behind the Totem Pole of Economics.  

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A Visit to Morocco

April 30, 2012

On April 19, my wife and I flew to Morocco for the Mont Pelerin Society meetings, the first to take place in an Arab country.  We stayed at the Le Royal Mansour Meridien in downtown Casablanca, a first class hotel with great service, but surrounding the hotel was a lot of dust, litter, and construction.  [...]

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Making of Modern Economics #2 in Ayn Rand Institute’s Top-Ten Must Read Books in Economics

April 7, 2012

Good news.  My book, The Making of Modern Economics, now in its second edition, won recognition from the Ayn Rand Institute, which published its first “top ten must-read books in economics,”  The Making of Modern Economics was ranked second, right behind Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson. I’m not complaining, since Steve Mariotti, president [...]

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Hillsdale College Lecture: Will the Real Adam Smith Please Stand Up?

February 15, 2012

Was Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, a libertarian, conservative, or radical democrat? Traditionally, free-market economists such as Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, have defended Smith as a great free-market economist, while Emma Rothschild, Gordon Brown, and yes, even Murray Rothbard, have demurred, suggesting that Smith was an interventionist who should [...]

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The Centrality of the Invisible Hand

January 31, 2012

THE CENTRALITY OF THE INVISIBLE HAND By Mark Skousen Lecture, Center for Constructive Alternatives Hillsdale College, January 31, 2012 “Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interest under conditions of competition.”– George Stigler[1] A major debate has flared [...]

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