When economists celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations next year, US President Donald Trump’s mercantilism will constitute an incongruous ...

In doing so, however, they provide further evidence that Adam Smith got there first. Before discussing the concept of value in “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), Smith notes the importance of ...

(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Adam Smith taught us that trade is not a zero-sum game 250 years ago. Trump may not have read his Wealth of Nations, but the rest of the world now must ...

But we would all be better off if Adam Smith had skipped the bit about “the invisible hand.” He meant little, if anything, by it—he used the term only once in the entire two volumes of The Wealth of ...

These were set out by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) as “canons of taxation." They still serve as a good test for tax ideas. The first canon is that of ‘equity.’ The tax burden ...

Adam Smith died on July 17, 1790, at age 68, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was buried in Canongate Kirkyard. In "The Wealth of Nations", Smith popularized many of the ideas that form the basis for ...