Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Daniel Henninger rightly denounces CEOs’ pandering to Progressives – pandering that chews cancerously at the market order that alone makes possible not only the success of these CEOs’ companies, but also the wealth that Progressives rely upon to fund their countless schemes (“When CEOs Zoom for Democrats,” April 15).
Such venal opportunism, alas, is as old as, well, venal opportunism. In the conclusion of his masterful survey of the works of Adam Smith, Craig Smith writes that
he [Adam Smith] did not think that commercial societies were perfect. Indeed many of the imperfections of commercial society were the result of the behaviour of merchants and businessmen. These groups had their own partial interests and were seldom friends of the sort of free markets that Smith advocated.”*
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* Craig Smith, Adam Smith (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020), page 178.
