The appeal, and the omission

The Hill's columnist declares that human dignity will be secured when Americans are free to innovate, compete, and flourish without federal bureaucrats standing in their way. I have considerable sympathy for that sentiment. I spent the better part of my working life demonstrating that mercantile restrictions — bounties, prohibitions, chartered monopolies — are, at bottom, a tax levied on the many for the enrichment of the few who are organised enough to lobby for them. The consumer's interest is routinely sacrificed to the producer's; the workman's wages are quietly compressed by arrangements he never consented to. On that score, the columnist and I are allies.

But liberty is not the absence of all framework

Here, however, I must part company with those who cite my name while reading only half the argument. The Wealth of Nations is not a tract against public institutions; it is an inquiry into which institutions serve the public and which serve only the merchants. I identified three duties that belong unambiguously to the sovereign: defence, justice — meaning the impartial enforcement of contract and the protection of the weak from the predations of the strong — and certain public works that private profit will never supply at adequate scale. Roads, harbours, basic education: these are not the enemies of a free economy. They are its precondition.

Dignity requires more than deregulation

The columnist pairs dignity with cultural renewal, and here I would ask a pointed question: what produces the narrowing of the human mind that threatens dignity most acutely? I argued, in the Wealth of Nations, that the division of labour — the very engine of our prosperity — confines the ordinary workman to one or two simple operations, and that a man who spends his life driving a nail has little occasion to exercise his judgment or his imagination. The remedy I prescribed was public education at the sovereign's expense: not grand universities for the well-born, but elementary instruction for the common person, so that no citizen enters the market wholly unable to defend his own interests. That is not a bureaucrat's imposition; it is the foundation on which meaningful liberty rests.

The invisible hand has a visible frame

I am frequently invoked by people who have not read me, in support of the proposition that markets, left entirely alone, produce just outcomes by some automatic mechanism. I never said that. What I said is that individuals, pursuing their own interest within a framework of law, moral sentiment, and honest institutional constraint, tend to serve the public interest as if guided by an invisible hand. Remove the framework — the impartial judge, the enforceable contract, the educated citizen who can read what he signs — and what remains is not a free market but a field on which the organised and the powerful extract rents from those who cannot organise to resist them. The East India Company was, in its day, the loudest champion of free enterprise; it also held a monopoly backed by the force of arms. The principle distinguishes the two.

What the institutional question demands

So I return, as I always do, to the institutional question: what framework makes the exchange honest? The columnist is right that excessive or capriciously applied regulation burdens commerce and degrades dignity by treating citizens as subjects to be managed rather than agents to be trusted. But the corrective is not the abolition of institutions; it is their reform toward impartiality and transparency. The sovereign who neglects justice, abandons public education, and withdraws from the maintenance of honest markets does not liberate the citizen — he delivers her to whoever happens to hold the greater private power at the moment. That is a form of government, too. It is simply one that has abandoned the pretence of answering to the public.