CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

CHAPTER 8
THE ANGUISH
OF ADAM SMITH
WE ARE lucky to have Adam Smith with us at all. He was born on an
uncertain date in 1723 in the town of Kirkcaldy on the Firth of
Forth in Scotland, his father having died six months earlier. Smith’s first biographer,
Dugald Stewart, recounts the following incident:
An accident which happened to him when he was about three years
old, is of too interesting a nature to be omitted in the account of so
valuable a life. He had been carried by his mother to Strathenry, on a
visit to his uncle Mr. Douglas, and was one day amusing himself alone
at the door of the house, when he was stolen by a party of that set of
vagrants who are known in Scotland by the name of tinkers. Luckily he
was soon missed by his uncle, who hearing that some vagrants had
passed, pursued them, with what assistance he could find, till he overtook
them in Leslie wood; and was the happy instrument of preserving
to the world a genius. 1
Following his early education he went to the University of Glasgow in
1737 and then in 1740 to the already 500-year-old Balliol college at Oxford.
Philosophy, history, mathematics, literature, and languages all “opened a
boundless field to his curiosity and ambition; and while it afforded scope to
all the various powers of his versatile and comprehensive genius, gratified
his ruling passion, of contributing to the happiness and the improvement
of society.” 2
After seven years at Oxford, Smith returned to Scotland to a life of
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