Stephen Dubner

The government didn't regulate industries as tightly as they did in the UK, nor did they feel as compelled to nationalize all the industries as was common in the UK.

It was curious to Butler that the U.S.

seemed more in sync with the free market teachings of Adam Smith than the government in the country that had produced Smith.

Just another prophet without honor in his own country.

Was the U.S.

government more Smithian because the University of Chicago economists were doing such a good job promoting the invisible hand?

The message had certainly worked on Butler and his fellow British expats.

Instead, they decided to relocate to London.

This was in 1977.

The Adam Smith Institute took up offices in Westminster, and their timing turned out to be extraordinary.

If there is one political leader over the past half century who embodied the conservative reading of Adam Smith, the Smith of free markets, of economic liberty, of smaller government, surely it's Margaret Thatcher.

She was prime minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990.

It has been said that Thatcher carried in her handbag a copy of The Wealth of Nations.

Here was the big question.

Would Britain be, as Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, a nation of shopkeepers?

Or would it be a nation of government bureaucrats?

Thatcher sided with shopkeepers.

And what did all this mean for Eamon Butler and his new Adam Smith Institute?

Thatcher cut taxes, slashed government spending, and curbed the trade unions.

She also set out to privatize a great many state assets and industries.