Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

To my friends “down under”, 🇦🇺 Happy Australia Day 🇦🇺! And to my friends in the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, keep resisting and keep on fighting for our freedoms! The heavy-handed and lawless Gestapo tactics by masked … Continue reading →

Like a meteor flashing in the night sky, the Spice Girls, the best-selling girl group of all time (see here), were a bright but relatively brief phenomenon …

I concluded my discussion of Adam Smith’s theory of economic development in Chapter 1 of Book II of The Wealth of Nations (see my previous post) with this observation: “a poor or developing nation does not make progress by accumulating … Continue reading →

Adam Smith is often referred to as “the father of economics.” Although my colleague and friend (and co-author) Salim Rashid has questioned whether Smith is deserving of this title, [1] one thing I can say for certain is this: Smith … Continue reading →

After his lengthy digression on the value of silver, Adam Smith concludes Book I of The Wealth of Nations with an important and original observation about the three major classes or “orders of people” in any economic system — i.e. … Continue reading →

Adam Smith concludes Book I of The Wealth of Nations with a lengthy detour titled “Digression concerning the Variations in the Value of Silver during the Course of the Four last Centuries.” (WN, I.xi.e-p) Although it is tempting to just … Continue reading →

What is the relationship between rent, profit, and wages — the ostensible subject of the second half of Book 1 of The Wealth of Nations — or between rents and prices more generally? Adam Smith grapples with these difficult theoretical … Continue reading →

I will resume my series on The Wealth of Nations in my next post; in the meantime; check out this homage to another great economist: Thomas Sowell.

In Part 2 of Chapter 10 of Book I of The Wealth of Nations (I.x.c; available here), Adam Smith identifies three types of “absurd” laws and regulations — absurd because they restrict our natural liberty and distort markets: Smith then … Continue reading →