Adam Smith -- yuks included

ADAM SMITH is an Enlightenment-era moral philosopher best known for writing “The Wealth of Nations,” a founding text of modern economics that checks in at more than 900 dense pages -- enough to discourage many a would-be reader.

P.J. O’Rourke is an impudent political satirist with a penchant for quippy one-liners, best known for such books as “Parliament of Whores” and “Give War a Chance.” He is also the choice of the editors at Atlantic Monthly Press to be Smith’s explicator for a mass audience as part of the publisher’s “Books That Changed the World” series. (The jacket headline: “P.J. O’Rourke reads Adam Smith so you don’t have to.”)

It’s not the best of matches. For one, O’Rourke is overly fond of Smith (“Even when he was wrong he was smarter than other people.”), which makes him a satirist with nothing really to satirize. Hence there are fewer snappy one-liners than usual, and his jokes often feel forced: “Then there is the matter of those goods and services -- Adam Smith’s gross domestic product. I am as grossly domestic as anyone. Where’s the product?” Hah, hah, hah.

The bigger problem is that O’Rourke is at best an amateur economist -- a point he is surprisingly happy to make several times (ah, self-deprecating wit). But he is a Mencken research fellow at the uber-libertarian Cato Institute, where he appears to have imbibed a very particular, morality-play view (markets = good; politicians = bad) of Smith’s much more complicated and nuanced magnum opus. “Free markets lead to thinking,” O’Rourke writes, “that eternal enemy of politicians.”

Unfortunately for those hoping to acquire a reasonable understanding of Smith, O’Rourke is either unwilling or unable to probe “The Wealth of Nations” for anything more than a series of Cato-approved talking points to the effect that unfettered commerce rules, governments drool.

Nowhere, for example, does O’Rourke really probe the workings of crucial Smith concepts such as comparative advantage, the division of labor or the nature of competition. Nor does he explore Smith’s controversial characterization of human nature as innately predisposed to “truck, barter, and exchange.” And though he touches on Smith’s conclusions about man being much disposed to sympathy for his fellow man, he does not explore how Smith’s praise of self-interest is fundamentally circumscribed by this assumption -- that the market is perfectly self-regulating only if you believe that people won’t cheat each other if they have the chance. Also missing: Smith’s disregard for joint-stock corporations, which he criticized for their greed, irresponsibility and generally anti-competitive nature.

Instead, O’Rourke’s approach is to plod through the five books of “The Wealth of Nations” in order, telling us that Smith said this, Smith said that, furnishing direct quote after direct quote, cherry-picking his way to a series of pro-market policy prescriptions that today’s leaders ignore at their own peril. “[M]aybe they’ll all buy my book and give it to [World Bank President] Paul Wolfowitz for Christmas,” he writes hopefully.

O’Rourke misses no opportunity to lob predictable barbs at politicians (who, by some remarkable stroke of chance, all happen to be bumptious and venal, while all private commerce-loving citizens are honest and virtuous). For example, in his very limited discussion of the division of labor, O’Rourke quips that “the specialization of politics at least keeps politicians from running businesses where their stupidity and ignorance could do even greater harm to economic growth.”

But something strange happens when O’Rourke gets to Book 5, where Smith wrestles with the proper functions of government and recommends the kind of mildly progressive state that makes free-market devotees like O’Rourke break out in hives. O’Rourke decides that in applying his “lofty intellect to mundane political issues, [Smith] yielded to the temptation to slide down Olympus.” Here, the “truly sagacious” Smith of Book 2 is suddenly spouting “mixed-up pronouncements.”

And when the Scottish political economist suggests that landowners should be taxed on the rent they collect, O’Rourke can only conclude, “Smith must have been completely out of his head.” Then again, “thinking about taxes leads to bad thinking,” O’Rourke explains. Except, of course, when Smith opposes inheritance taxes and value-added taxes, as he also does in Book 5, which makes him OK.

If O’Rourke weren’t a Cato Institute fellow, a reader might wonder whether the satirist had in fact produced a brilliant satire of the righteous black-and-white sermonizing to which free-market devotees are often prone. At some points, he is so over-the-top, so unwilling to engage in anything resembling nuance, it feels like it must be a parody. At one point, he even writes: “[N]o people are as rapacious and grabby as those who work for the public good. They don’t want mere millions or billions of dollars to satisfy personal avarice,” he explains. “They seek trillions of dollars necessary to make life on earth better for everyone.” Imagine the horror! True evil revealed at last! Parody or not, anyone who wants to understand what Adam Smith was up to would be well-advised to decline O’Rourke’s offer and instead read the darn books for themselves (preferably in annotated and abridged form).

Lee Drutman is the co-author of “The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.”