Adam Smith’s Enemy Was the East India Company, Not the Tariff of 1789
Charles Benoit
June 12, 2026
This week, Scott Lincicome marked the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations by recruiting Adam Smith into the free-trade lobby’s war on American tariffs. It’s a clever conscription, but it depends on erasing the most important fact about Smith’s world: when Smith attacked “mercantilism,” he was attacking a system America’s founders also rejected — and replaced with something Smith never imagined.
