Glory Liu

That's a great way of describing it.

You have people like James Madison who will say things like, oh, you know, I own this great text on political economy and I'm a friend to commerce.

The implication or the kind of subtext is like, this was a smart man who wrote

900 plus pages about different ways to think about commerce, the relationship between agriculture and manufacturing, the conditions under which liberalized trade made sense versus prioritizing national defense.

This is the most sophisticated, most up-to-date analysis of what it means to be at the helm of a nation that cares about national wealth.

So it's natural that you have the founders, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, reading The Wealth of Nations to understand a way of thinking of national wealth.

The primary source of revenue for the federal government in its fledgling decades is from import taxes.

And later on, much later on, like after the Civil War, the tariff becomes a wedge issue.

It's the issue that divides Democrats and Republicans, Republicans being the party of protectionism and Democrats being the party of free trade.

You have people from both sides of the debate, free trade and protectionism, being like, but Adam Smith...

Look at what Adam Smith said.

Oh, even the apostle of free trade said that the home market was really important.

And so you start to see that, like, the intellectual authority matters.

It's not Smith's ideas that matter that much anymore.

It's his authority.

That authority rests on an assumption that the science he created, the science of political economy...

That's accurate according to my view of things.

One place to start is to ask, okay, well, what were the problems and complexities in the earlier versions of Smith?

So this brings us to kind of early Chicago school.

The figures that I look at are people like Jacob Viner and Frank Knight, and they are these like heavyweights.