Eamonn Butler

It did get right out around the world.

And partly because he'd written about the colonies and so on, I think the Americans took it up very enthusiastically, the American founding fathers.

That was quite thrilling that it was an administration which was genuinely interested in ideas.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

Now, I got a call from the Bank of England, their library, and they said, do you have any good images of Adam Smith?

And I said, well, there's plenty, you know, what would you like?

And they said, well, I'm not really supposed to tell you this, but we're thinking of putting him on a bank note.

We'd all emigrated to America, given that the British economy was plummeting.

And so we joined what's called the Brain Drain.

I spent a couple of years in America.

I worked on Capitol Hill for a group of congressmen, which was very educational because it let me understand how legislation was made, which is a bit like making sausages, not very pleasant to watch.

And then I taught philosophy for a year in Hillsdale in Michigan.

For example, in the United States, you had competition in telephones.

Now, my economics professor in St.

Andrews told me that competition in telephones was theoretically impossible.

Friedman and Hayek and all of these great economists.

So he and a couple of friends started up a free market think tank.

We'd seen lots of interesting ideas in America that we thought could work in the UK.

And originally, we thought we would swap ideas across the Atlantic.

In 1979, Mrs. Thatcher was elected in the UK, and we had a bit of an open goal in terms of promoting free market theories and free society theories.