Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” turns 250: Why It Still Matters

Lesen Sie die deutsche Version hier.

Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” was published 250 years ago. The central thesis of The Wealth of Nations involves both a mechanism and a means. The mechanism is the full development of the motor of prosperity and growth, which Smith called “opulence.” This wealth is access to the necessities and conveniences of life, rather than bullion or assets. Smith’s philosophy is one of joy and human flourishing.

Smith called this means “the system of natural liberty.” With certain important exceptions, Smith thought that when people pursued their own interests in a system free of monopoly privilege and barriers to competition, the division of labor developed most fully. The state was tasked with managing the administration of justice, protecting the “three p’s”: Person, Property, and Promise (contract). The state was also to provide defense, build infrastructure, and expand education. In that context, nothing else needs to be done by the state beyond these tasks.

The general question Smith tried to answer still vexes us today: when can a society trust decentralized exchange to coordinate production, and when should we insist that a public authority steer and direct investment and production?

Smith did not provide any single answer; instead, he bequeathed a way of arguing. He defined certain core tasks for the state, and then argued for subsidiarity in all other social domains, establishing a rebuttable presumption in favor of private choice and decentralized organization. The book’s continuing importance lies in its focus on this discipline, on this habit of mind.

In some ways, Smith seems quite distant from our present concerns. He never used the word “capitalism,” and called capital “stock.” He did not anticipate huge multinational corporations (though he is quite clear about decrying those he was familiar with, including the British East India Company). He did not understand what we now think of as finance, though he established the set of questions that later led Walter Bagehot to describe and explain modern credit markets. The Wealth of Nations is a portrait of commercial society in shades of grey, not purely evil but far from purely good.

I have highlighted five of Smith’s central contributions, ideas that still structure how we think about capitalism, its virtues, its vices, and the political order that makes it possible.

I. The Default Argument: Markets are the Baseline, Not an Exception

Smith did not invent markets. What he did, with the quiet audacity of a moral philosopher taking on the commercial empires of his day, was to normalize them. He made the case that decentralized exchange, under the shelter of law, is not a chaotic alternative to “rational” direction; it is a form of coordination. Remove the government’s “systems of preference or restraint,” he argued, and the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord.” The punch line is not that government disappears. It is that the statesman should bear the burden of proof. To “superintend the industry of private people” requires a knowledge “no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient” to possess.

The rhetorical framing was revolutionary. For centuries, commerce had carried a moral odor. The medieval tradition had permitted buying and selling, but with conditions and under suspicions: profit was defensible only when bounded by virtue; contracts were legitimate only when not tainted by fraud; and the loan of money was haunted by the charge of usury. In that older moral universe, the merchant could be tolerated, even respected, but rarely celebrated. What changed in the early modern period was not merely the growth of trade but the growth of an argument that made trade morally intelligible. Smith belongs to, and in part caused, the moment when a society begins to see exchange not as a vice but as social cooperation.

«The punch line is not that government disappears. It is that the statesman should bear the burden of proof.»

Here, his earlier work matters. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith portrays the human being as an animal of sympathy, craving the approval of others, capable of self-command, and vulnerable to vanity. The Wealth of Nations does not discard that psychology. It relocates it. Smith does not simply declare greed good. He argues something subtler and, in practice, more radical: the ordinary motive of “betterment,” when channeled through exchange under rules of justice, can be socially productive rather than morally suspect. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,” he writes, “that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” The sentence is often recited as a hymn to selfishness. Read carefully, it is an observation about persuasion. A bargain is not a plea for charity; it is an appeal to another person’s reasons. “Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want” is “the meaning of every such offer.”

This is what makes Smith’s default presumption last. When economists debate deregulation, privatization, and trade, the baseline often runs Smith’s way: competition and entry are treated as the presumptively “normal” mechanism for organizing production, and intervention must explain why it can do better. The point is not that markets always work. Smith’s market order depends on strong conditions – secure property, predictable law, and trade. But the baseline matters. It trains the eye to ask first: is there a reason this problem cannot be handled by open competition? If not, why would we replace decentralized knowledge with central discretion?

Smith’s argument for decentralized coordination is easy to caricature as faith. It is better read as a theory of comparative self-correction. In his discussion of prices, he describes a world in which the market price “naturally” comes to match a “natural price,” and in which that natural price acts like a gravitational center. Markets do not always hit equilibrium, but they contain a mechanism that pushes errors toward correction, and that mechanism does not require anyone to know the entire system.

Smith extends the same logic to the allocation of capital. People invest where profit is higher; if too much capital flows into one use, profit falls there and rises elsewhere, “immediately” disposing investors to alter a “faulty distribution,” “without any intervention of law.”

Yet even in Smith, the presumption is conditional. He does not say “markets” in the abstract; he says “competition.” The market order depends on the ability of people to bring their “industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.” That clause – the possibility of rivalry – does most of the work. When rivalry is blocked, the market’s self-correction fails, and the presumption should be reversed. Smith’s anti-monopoly passages are therefore not decorations on his pro-market argument; they are its spine.

Interlude: The Engine in the Chest

Smith’s most durable moral claim is easy to miss because it sounds so mild. He believes that most people, most of the time, try to improve their condition and that this desire is not a mere vice, but a remarkably reliable engine of progress. The “uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition,” he writes, is the principle from which both “public and national” as well as “private opulence” is derived. He adds an almost startling confidence: this effort is “frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.”

This is not a romantic claim about human goodness. It is a claim about human persistence. People learn, save, experiment, and bargain; they look for slightly better wages, slightly better tools, and slightly better deals. The result is not a linear ascent, but a tendency, one that can be interrupted by war, predation, and privilege, but also one that can survive a remarkable amount of folly.

This betterment motive also explains why Smith is so attentive to institutions. If people are constantly trying to improve their situation, then the rules that govern improvement matter intensely. A society can channel that motive toward productive activity, new products, new skills, new arrangements, or it can channel it toward destructive activity, fraud, predation, and political privilege. Smith’s book is, in part, a guide to designing the former and resisting the latter.

Smith’s betterment motive is also a theory about time. Much of The Wealth of Nations is concerned with how a society takes tomorrow seriously: saving, accumulating “stock,” and investing in improvements whose payoff is delayed. When people expect that contracts will be enforced and property will not be plundered, they can afford to plan; when they do not, they consume in the present and hide what they can. In that sense, Smith’s political economy is a theory of trust made material. Institutions that protect expectations turn prudence into productivity.

This helps explain why Smith’s optimism is always paired with his caution. The betterment motive is resilient, but it is not indestructible. It can be diverted. A society can teach its most ambitious citizens that the best route to improvement is not invention but influence; not serving customers but capturing regulators; not competing but excluding. Smith’s animating fear is that privilege will turn the energy of betterment into a race for favors. That is why he returns, again and again, to the need for general rules that keep improvement aligned with production rather than predation.

« A society can teach its most ambitious citizens that the best route to improvement is not invention but influence; not serving customers but capturing regulators; not competing but excluding.»

II. The Pin Factory’s Afterlife: Specialization as the Engine of Wealth

If The Wealth of Nations has a single scene that refuses to die, it is the pin factory. Smith’s “trifling manufacture” has been summarized, parodied, and turned into a classroom ritual. It survives because it captures, in miniature, the central miracle of modern prosperity: ordinary tasks, properly arranged, can yield extraordinary output.

Smith’s claim was stark. “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour,” he wrote, “seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.” The mechanism is not mystical. It is a sequence of small, compounding advantages: dexterity increases when a worker repeats one task; time is saved when hands do not constantly switch; and focused attention generates inventions – often from people no one would think of as inventors. In Smith’s story, a boy ties a string to a valve so he can leave his post and play. The improvement is not planned by a committee; it is discovered by someone trying to save his own effort.

Two and a half centuries later, the pin factory is everywhere. It is in the choreography of an operating room, where a surgeon’s skill depends on anesthesiologists, nurses, sterilization protocols, and instrument makers. It is in the assembly of a smartphone, which requires rare earths, glass chemistry, software engineering, and logistics in a chain so long that no single mind can grasp it. It is in the “boring” infrastructure of modern life, the standardized shipping container, the barcode, the credit-card network that allows specialized effort to travel across the planet.

What we now call “the knowledge economy” is, in many ways, Smith’s argument by other means. A mathematician trains for years to solve a narrow class of problems; a lawyer specializes in one kind of contract; an engineer becomes expert in one layer of a technical stack. Even artificial intelligence, which is often described as a general-purpose technology, is produced by an assembly line of specialists: data curators, model architects, chip designers, safety researchers, product managers. Smith’s insight is that opulence emerges not from a heroic planner but from a system that makes it worthwhile for thousands of people to deepen their narrow, particular competence in partial tasks and then connect those tasks through exchange.

Smith noted that specialization is limited by the “extent of the market.” A porter can find employment only in a great town, because specialization requires enough demand to sustain a narrow role. This sounds quaint until you notice that the internet has become the greatest town in human history. It is a market without walls, where even an obscure specialization can find a paying audience. The gig economy is a modern version of the porter: labor becomes modular, task-based, and geographically unbound. The same logic fuels the rise of niche expertise, global freelancing, and the strange phenomenon of people earning a living by doing something that would have been considered a hobby a generation earlier.

The Smithian story of division of labour is often told as pure uplift: more specialization means more productivity, which means higher living standards. Smith did make that connection. Division of labour, he wrote, produces a “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” The point is democratic: modern comfort is not a trophy of kings but a cumulative product of many ordinary hands.

But Smith also saw the darker side. The modern world of careers, credentials, and professional identities is, in part, the lived experience of Smithian specialization. That includes its psychological costs. Specialization narrows attention; it can also narrow the person. Smith’s most alarming passage about the division of labour appears not in his discussion of pins but in his discussion of education. The worker whose life is spent performing “a few simple operations,” he writes, “has no occasion to exert his understanding.” Smith even likens the result to a kind of “mental mutilation.”

«The modern world of careers, credentials, and professional identities is, in part, the lived experience of Smithian specialization.»

It is hard not to hear an echo of this in modern anxieties about boredom, alienation, and the hollowing out of civic life. We are told that technology will free us from routine work, yet many people experience modern labor as a treadmill of metrics, scripts, and surveillance. A society can be rich in goods and poor in meaning. Smith’s contribution is that he refuses to treat this as a separate moral problem. It is part of political economy. The same forces that create prosperity can erode the capacities that make a people governable. His answer is not to abolish specialization but to counterbalance it with institutions, above all education, that preserve the mind’s breadth and the citizen’s dignity.

III. The Invisible Hand, or the Art of Not Being the “Man of System”

No phrase from The Wealth of Nations has been more quoted and more abused than “the invisible hand.” It is invoked to bless deregulation, to dismiss inequality, to defend outcomes that are neither competitive nor just. And yet the phrase remains powerful, precisely because it names a real phenomenon: social order can arise from motives that are not public-spirited, and the consequences of action often differ from intentions.

In the famous passage, Smith describes an investor who prefers domestic industry to foreign trade, largely for reasons of security. By trying to keep his capital close to home and by seeking the highest return, the investor “is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Under the right rules – justice, predictable law, and competitive rivalry – private aims can generate public benefits without anyone having to design them.

This is the seed of a modern analytic habit. Economists now speak of incentives and constraints, equilibrium and mechanism design. Smith did not have the formal apparatus, but he had the instinct: don’t begin with what people mean to do; begin with what rules make their behavior compatible with the public interest. The invisible hand, in this sense, is less a doctrine than a prompt. It teaches the reader to look for the system that emerges from ordinary motives, and to notice where institutions turn those motives toward predation.

It also teaches humility. Smith was skeptical of the “man of system” (from Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Smith published in 1759), the reformer who imagines he can arrange society as if its members were chess pieces. The line is often used against technocrats, but it also applies to market fundamentalists. A person who believes “the market will solve it” can be just as much a man of system as a person who believes “the state will fix it.” Both assume that one mechanism can be trusted to handle every problem. Smith, by contrast, asks us to inspect the mechanism in context. Does it rely on rivalry? Does it require information that real people do not have? Does it depend on virtues – honesty, trust, restraint – that institutions may or may not sustain?

This brings us to why the invisible hand has been overused. The phrase became an emblem of automatic harmony. But Smith’s own work undermines that reading. He is careful to distinguish the “natural price” of free competition from the “price of monopoly.” The monopolist keeps the market “constantly under-stocked,” selling “much above the natural price” (which today we would call the market price under conditions of competition). The monopoly price, Smith writes, is “upon every occasion the highest which can be got,” whereas the price of free competition is “the lowest which can be taken” for any considerable time. This is not a hymn to markets as such; it is an argument for markets as a disciplined, rivalrous process.

Smith’s “natural liberty,” likewise, is not the freedom of the powerful to do as they please; it is the freedom of “every man” to bring “his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men,” so long as he does not violate the laws of justice. Competition is not a spiritual property of markets. It is a political and legal achievement that must be protected against those who would prefer safety to rivalry.

Here Smith’s relevance intersects with our own anxieties. The modern economy is rich in coordination and poor in contestability. Platforms become natural monopolies by network effects; data advantages harden into entry barriers; firms purchase regulation as a moat; and “innovation” becomes a synonym for “locking in.” Smith anticipated the appetite for monopoly. What he underestimated was how sophisticated the machinery of monopoly would become – how easily economic power and political power could fuse into a self-reinforcing system. When that happens, the invisible hand does not so much vanish as curl into a fist.

«The modern economy is rich in coordination and poor in contestability.»

IV. Against Mercantilism: The Old Story That Keeps Reappearing

Smith’s enemies had names: guilds, chartered companies, tariff walls, navigation acts, and the “man of system” who imagines he can arrange a society like pieces on a chessboard. The mercantile system, as he described it, treated wealth as a stock of treasure to be hoarded and treated trade as a contest in which one nation’s gain must be another’s loss. It used monopoly privilege as the lever of policy. Monopoly, Smith wrote, was “the sole engine of the mercantile system.”

It is tempting to read this as a museum exhibit: interesting, historically important, and safely past. Yet the mercantile impulse is not dead; it merely changes costumes. It reappears whenever politicians promise to restore greatness by managing trade, whenever a domestic industry demands protection from foreign “unfairness,” whenever a licensing board becomes a guild, whenever a subsidy becomes a political entitlement, and whenever a regulation quietly exempts the firms powerful enough to write it. In an age that talks about “industrial policy” rather than “mercantilism,” the rhetoric is more sophisticated, but the political mechanism can be old-fashioned: the benefits of protection are concentrated, the costs are dispersed, and the beneficiaries show up for meetings.

The contemporary version is often less dramatic than a royal charter and therefore easier to miss. It can be a line in a thousand-page bill that defines a compliance threshold just high enough that only the incumbents can meet it. It can be a licensing requirement justified by safety but enforced as a barrier to entry. It can be a procurement rule that looks like nationalism but functions as a guarantee of sales for a well-connected producer. None of these policies announces itself as “monopoly.” That is precisely their power. They turn coercion into paperwork, and privilege into a procedure.

One way to see Smith’s continuing relevance is to notice how often contemporary arguments re-enact his cast of characters. The chartered company becomes the platform that controls access to a marketplace. The guild becomes the licensing regime that keeps newcomers out of a profession. The navigation act becomes the procurement rule that requires domestic content. The mercantilist promise of national greatness becomes the claim that any loss of domestic production is a loss of sovereignty.

Smith does not tell us that all such interventions are foolish. He does, however, force us to ask an uncomfortable question: are we building public capacity, or are we selling privilege? Many policies wear the clothing of the common good while doing the quiet work of rent allocation. A tariff is also a subsidy, just disguised; a regulation can be a barrier to entry, if it is expensive enough to comply with; a tax credit can be an industrial policy, if it is tailored enough to select winners. The details matter, and Smith is, above all, a writer about details.

«Many policies wear the clothing of the common good while doing the quiet work of rent allocation.»

His hostility to privilege is not anti-government; it is anti-particularism. Law should be general, not tailored; privileges should be suspect; and state power should not operate as a vending machine for the best-organized interests. He distrusted the self-description of those who profit from policy. He believed that merchants and manufacturers are capable of the “clamour” of interest, and that a statesman who trusts them will often mistake private advantage for public good. His critique remains a civic lesson: before you ask whether a policy is efficient, ask who asked for it.

This is one reason Smith became the ancestor of modern political economy and public choice, long after his death. The modern theory provides equations; Smith provides the temperament. He reminds us that politics is not a neutral instrument waiting to be used for public good; it is a contested arena in which organized interests compete for advantage. To forget this is to become, in a new way, the man of system: the person who imagines that a policy can be evaluated solely by its stated purpose, without attending to how it will be used.

V. The State as Architect: Limited, Real, and Indispensable

Smith is sometimes caricatured as the patron saint of “laissez faire,” or “no government.” The caricature is convenient for enemies and allies alike. In reality, Smith offered a more demanding and modern account of the state: not as universal manager, but as institutional architect.

His list of sovereign duties is famous: defense, justice, and “public works and public institutions” that private actors will not provide on adequate terms. That framework still organizes contemporary debates. Defense and justice are the obvious prerequisites of commerce; without security and predictable enforcement, markets become predatory and short-lived. Smith’s emphasis on the administration of justice is especially relevant to any society tempted to treat property as a mere legal fiction. “It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate,” he observed, that the owner of valuable property “can sleep a single night in security.” Markets depend on law.

Justice, for Smith, is not merely a slogan. It is the daily machinery of courts, enforcement, and credibility. A promise to pay, a deed to land, a partnership agreement, a wage contract – all of these are, in practice, a bet on institutions. When those institutions are corrupt, slow, or captured, the market does not become more “natural”; it becomes more personal. Economic life turns into a web of favors and protection, and the most valuable asset becomes proximity to power. Smith’s insistence on an “exact administration of justice” is therefore not austere moralizing; it is the operating system of commercial society.

This is also why Smith’s state is indispensable. A private arbitration service can handle some disputes, but it cannot supply the legitimacy that makes rulings authoritative when the stakes are high. Private security can protect some property, but it cannot replace a public monopoly on lawful coercion without becoming a rival sovereignty. In practice, the institutional architect cannot subcontract away the foundations and remain a state.

Smith’s remarks on property are also a useful antidote to sentimentality. He notes that where there is great property there is great inequality, and he offers a hard-edged description of what civil government does in such a world: it is “instituted for the security of property,” and therefore, “in reality,” for the defense of those who have property against those who have none. The line is sometimes used to recruit Smith into radical critiques of capitalism. It is better read as a reminder that commerce sits on a political foundation that cannot be morally ignored. A society that celebrates markets while refusing to discuss power is performing an ideological magic trick.

But Smith’s government is not merely a night watchman. His discussion of public works anticipates modern arguments about infrastructure, education, and the institutions that sustain a functioning commercial society. Some goods are hard to finance through private profit alone, even when they are essential to growth. Roads, bridges, ports, and the basic legal architecture of contract and property are not glamorous, but they are the skeletal system of commerce. When they fail, markets do not become freer; they become more fragile.

Smith also treats education as a civic investment, not merely a private consumption good. The division of labour may generate wealth, but it can also generate a population too narrowed to govern itself. A commercial society, in Smith’s view, requires citizens who can read, reason, and resist manipulation; otherwise, it becomes easy prey for demagogues and for those who would sell privilege as patriotism.

This middle position is part of why Smith remains claimable by multiple political traditions. He is neither a utopian planner nor a romantic anarchist. He is a realist about the temptations of power, and a realist about the necessity of institutions. If his government is limited, it is also indispensable, because it performs tasks that markets require but cannot easily supply.

 VI. Smith’s Big Miss: When Competition Becomes a Maintenance Problem

Every classic text has a blind spot that reveals the author’s era. Smith’s deepest miss is not that he failed to foresee the internet or global finance. It is that he failed to foresee how badly capitalism can run when competition is weak and power is organized.

Smith saw monopoly and collusion clearly. He knew that merchants prefer a quiet life to rivalry. He knew that privileged firms would use the state to protect themselves. Yet he could still be read –especially by later enthusiasts – as offering a self-maintaining commercial order, a system that, once freed from “preference and restraint,” would largely take care of itself. Modern experience suggests otherwise. Commercial orders are maintenance-intensive. Competition must be defended, not assumed.

The twenty-first century offers an instructive catalogue. Market concentration can persist not only because of explicit cartel behavior but because scale, network effects, and data advantages make entry implausible. Political economy can turn policy into rent allocation rather than rule-setting: subsidies, tax provisions, and regulatory exceptions become a currency exchanged between firms and politicians. Financial complexity can outrun governance, creating a cycle in which private actors capture gains in boom times and socialize losses in crises. And the moral language Smith helped rehabilitate – self-interest as betterment – can curdle into a justification for indifference, as though the existence of a transaction were proof of justice.

«Commercial orders are maintenance-intensive. Competition must be defended, not assumed.»

Smith’s own work contains resources for resisting these outcomes. His critique of monopoly is relentless. His insistence that liberty is bounded by justice is a rebuke to any ideology that treats power as a side issue. Yet his era did not confront a world in which private organizations could rival states in their ability to shape information, norms, and rules. Smith’s merchants could lobby; they could not rewrite the informational environment at scale.

If there is a contemporary way to extend Smith, it is to take his conditions seriously: property must be secure, and power contestable; law must be predictable, but also general; markets must be open, but also policed against privilege. The visible hand of policy, in this view, is not there to replace markets but to keep them from being replaced by monopolists.

VII. Why Read The Wealth of Nations Now?

Smith’s continuing importance does not lie in a set of policy prescriptions that can be applied like a stencil. It lies in a posture: skeptical of privilege, alert to unintended consequences, respectful of decentralized knowledge, and insistent that commerce depends on justice. Those habits are useful because politics is full of people eager to sell simple systems – whether “the market will solve it” or “the state will fix it” – to citizens too busy to read footnotes.

The book also remains a tonic for moral confusion. In moments of economic anxiety, societies tend to hunt for villains: foreigners, speculators, middlemen, profiteers. Smith, who was no friend of monopoly or fraud, nonetheless insisted that much of what looks like exploitation is simply coordination in a world of scarcity and ignorance. People “frequently” promote the interest of society “more effectually” by pursuing their own interest than when they “affected to trade for the public good.” That line is sharp enough to sting, even now, because it punctures the romance of performative virtue. It also punctures the romance of performative policy.

The miracle of commercial society is that strangers can cooperate at scale without having to love one another. But Smith’s moral defense of commerce is not a license for complacency. It is an argument for building and maintaining the institutions that make cooperation possible. In a world where artificial intelligence can concentrate advantage, where global supply chains can fracture overnight, and where political polarization can turn policy into spoils, Smith’s central lesson is both humbling and energizing: systems are not self-sustaining. They are constructed, constrained, and corrected by law, norms, and the persistent work of citizens who refuse to let privilege become fate.

It is fashionable to treat “capitalism” as a single thing: a machine that either works or fails, a moral system to be praised or condemned. Smith’s enduring value is that he refuses that simplification. He writes instead about particular institutions: ports and turnpikes, monopolies and taxes, courts and schools, habits and incentives. He invites us to trade metaphysics for diagnosis. The result is a kind of political economy that feels strangely contemporary: less like a manifesto and more like a maintenance manual for a society that wants to be both prosperous and free.

That is why Smith can still irritate people across the spectrum. He annoys the romantic who wishes commerce were pure corruption; he annoys the ideologue who wishes markets were pure harmony. He insists that commerce is a human institution – capable of cooperation, capable of cruelty – and therefore always vulnerable to power. If the modern world has taught us anything, it is that the hardest part of a commercial society is not generating wealth. It is keeping the rules general, keeping entry possible, keeping privilege from hardening into fate, and keeping citizens educated enough to notice when it does.

The Wealth of Nations endures because it is not easily categorized; Smith was a complex, nuanced thinker, and both anarchists and dirigistes have found a variety of things to admire (and some to scorn!) in the text. The book does not let us treat markets as magic, but neither does it allow government as deus ex machina. It asks instead for the harder, more adult task: to understand how ordinary motives, operating under particular rules, produce a society – sometimes prosperous, sometimes cruel, always in need of prudent assessment. If we keep arguing with Adam Smith, it is because he keeps giving us better questions than the ones we want to ask.