An inquiry into the nature and causes of getting big-government leftists to write introductions to Adam Smith
I just got a beautiful hard-bound set of The Wealth of Nations, which is one of my personal favourite philosophical works, as you might expect. The introduction is, rather perversely, an excerpt from a paper by John Kenneth Galbraith — a keynesian, big-government progressive with a bias toward high taxes and state control of the economy. Does that seem weird to anybody but me? I mean, political views notwithstanding (yeah, I think Galbraith was a fool, but that’s not the point), it strikes me as plain odd to introduce a work with a paper basically condemning every word of it. It would be like printing a Bible with an introduction taken from The God Delusion.
