Talk about the French. I think the interesting speculation here is why does the knowledge of Catalan and Torgas drop out?
And the whole French utility, laissez-faire, time preference, whatever tradition, entrepreneurship.
And why do people then think that Adam Smith founded economics? They always preceded Adam Smith.
All these guys wrote before the Western nations. Kind of like whether the same year,
Thomas and government unfortunately of course was forgotten on the great Smithian wave and why did
Smith as Cotter said make waste and rubbish of 2,000 years of economic thought and why did he
allow to get away with it why did nobody even say that he was doing this and it's very interesting
I think the for one thing see J.B. Say who's a who succeeds Turgot in the French tradition
never referred to Turgot any of these people he knew them he was a disciple basically of Turgot
He was a classical liberal laissez-faire person carrying on the battle through the French Revolution and after it.
He was not just an economist, he was also a political thinker and activist.
The question is, why did the state say that Smith founded economics?
Say he was one of the people responsible for the myth.
Why didn't he talk about the French tradition?
He really disagreed with Smith on almost everything.
If you read the book, there was nothing Smithian about it.
There was no cost of production theory, no labor theory.
It's all utility and productivity and hardcore laissez-faire.
and Fair. I think there's only two explanations. I've puzzled over this for quite some time,
how the Smith myth originated, why these guys, the knowledge of the French theorists got
lost. They were discredited in France itself, discredited for two reasons. One, because
Turgot was locked in with the Physicraft, even though he really wasn't. He was a political
ally of the Physicraft. He was not an economic, I mean, he was way beyond the Physicraft.
He thought that agriculture was the only productive factor of production, crazy taboo economy,
And he stated that he was not going to believe any of this stuff, but he was linked with the Physicrafts politically, and politically the Physicrafts were linked up with the absolute monarchy, because their strategic perspective was, in fact they were favored absolute monarchy, because it's simple, you convert the king and that's it, you get laissez-faire, one mess around, democracy and mass movements, convert the king, and in fact they tried to convert a whole bunch of kings. And so after absolute monarchy disappeared, after the French Revolution, they were politically discredited, nobody wanted to listen to any guy who favored absolute monarchy. And also, of course, the Physicrafts, nobody really believed
I believe by this time agriculture was the only productive factor because there was a lot of industry growing at the time.
So, for those two reasons, I think, the physics class and Turow got the spread of it, unfortunately, in France, and nobody would refer to them.
And the knowledge drops out. The paradigm is lost. The whole thing drops out.
It's a real tragedy for economic law because then we're stuck for a century with stuff with the British.