Observe the Power of this fully operational Internet!

What is most striking about the Internet is the community aspect.  It's not broadcast, it's a conversation, even in my little corner of it.

A few days ago, I pointed out a non-leftist critique of Adam Smith.  Reader John Kelleher emails with an information-rich update that this actually isn't particularly unusual.  I post it here with his permission:

Don't have a google or blogger account. I tried commenting to this effect at Foseti's site; apparently he wasn't interested.

Financial analyst John D. Mueller has a highly-developed non-leftist critique of Adam Smith, and of modern economics. Brief summary (source: http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.3939/pub_detail.asp ):

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"...what is economics about? The short answer is production, exchange, distribution, and consumption. Scholastic economics (c.1250-1776) began when Thomas Aquinas integrated these four elements, all drawn from Aristotle and Augustine, at the individual, domestic and political levels. This "AAA" outline was taught by Catholics and Protestants (after the Reformation) for more than five centuries. (Lutheran Samuel Pufendorf's version was widely known in the American colonies and cited by Alexander Hamilton among other founders.)

"Classical economics (1776-1871) began when Adam Smith cut these four elements to two, trying to explain what he called "division of labor" (specialized production) by production and exchange alone. When three economists (W.S. Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras) simultaneously but independently reinvented Augustine's theory of utility, reintegrating consumption with production and exchange, "neoclassical" economics (1871-c.2000) was born.

"Adam Smith's significance is therefore not what he added to, but rather subtracted from economics. The necessity of describing all four facets of any economic event with at most three equations has condemned classical and neoclassical economists frequently to resort to circular logic and/or empirically false assumptions."
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Mueller's book-length treatment is here:

http://www.isi.org/books/bookdetail.aspx?id=60260279-5db7-4061-9549-71356eb6c530

Best wishes,

And because that wasn't information-rich enough, he follows up again:

Forgot to point out the obvious in my previous: Mr. Mueller is not so much making his own non-leftist critique of Adam Smith as pointing out that there was, in effect, FIVE CENTURIES of non-leftist critique of Adam Smith prior to him and his ideas (and that nobody now notices this fact, but we should).

Huh.  I'm smarter now that I was a few days ago, thanks to the Internet and an interested reader.  Cool.