Free market, the West must not forget Adam Smith’s lesson

In 1990 it was two hundred years since his death, this year it is three hundred since his birth. Adam Smith was baptized on June 5, at the time it was not uncommon for children to be baptized on the same day they came into the world, especially the apparently more fragile ones. The calendar was still the Julian one, so we are divided between those who celebrated it on June 5th and those who waited for the 16th. In 1990, the celebrations were festive: half of Europe was trying to recover the grammar of the market economy. Even in Italy, after a long ordeal, an authority that guaranteed competition and the market was born. Smith could never have imagined economies presided over by states that control approximately 50 percent of output, as it is in the West today, much less “planned economies”, in which production decisions depend entirely on the political class. Already in 1755, however, he observed that “very little is needed to lead a state from the lowest barbarism to the highest degree of opulence, if not peace, light taxation and a reasonable administration of justice”. The rest will come by itself. “When a government seeks to divert this natural course, by forcing things into a different channel or by endeavoring to arrest at a particular point the progress of society, it is unnatural and, if it is to perpetuate itself, it will be obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.” In front of the shattered wall, in 1990 it sounded like a prophecy.