“even Adam Smith called for…” is one of The Interventionist’s favorite phrases. The other is “even Milton Friedman called for…” It’s a simple game of finding the errors in an ostensibly free-market thinker’s logic and then using it to bully less well-informed free-marketeers who lazily defer to authority. Krugman’s appeal to Adam Smith here is just an appeal to authority, and as such, holds no water as an argument.

I should note that I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone say “even Murray Rothbard called for…”

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