Market Correction

23 January 2007

The Editor, The Washington Times

Dear Editor:

Larry Thornberry correctly observes that the ideas Adam Smith offered in The Wealth of Nations "still hold up" ("Morality and Economics," Jan. 23). So, too, do the ideas Smith offered in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Especially important is Smith's wise warning about anyone who itches to plan society - the "man of system" as Smith called him. Such a man, Smith observed, "seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it."*

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University

• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759):
http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html