Monday, September 11, 2006

How to Insult a Scotsman -- call him English!

Free trade in modern times has existed as an ideology since at least the 18th century, when an Englishman named Adam Smith proposed an economic system that would maximize the wealth of the British Empire.’

Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh dearie me. If the author cannot even get Adam Smith’s nationality correct what can we expect of the alleged ‘truth’ in the rest of his diatribe? An ‘Englishman’ indeed!

This is a lesson in how to insult the man and the nation to which he was a member in one sloppy step. Has the author – and the editor (I assume they do check for facts) – never heard of Google?

Smith was born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Fife in Scotland, clearly a Scotsman, and he lived most of his life in his native land, dying in Edinburgh in 1790, aged 64. His parents were Scottish, as were his grandparents.

The nonsense about him being an ‘Englishman’ is part of an article on the ‘Dollar Crisis’ (don’t ask) published in ‘Real Truth’, ‘a magazine restoring plain understanding’ from the ‘Restored Church of God’, in Wadsworth, Ohio. The rest of article is tendentious enough without it committing gross discourtesies of the kind that gets elementary facts wrong, especially facts that are so well known as to be classed as ‘real truths’.

At this time of night I will not bother examining the further nonsense about Smith in the article but I may come back to it the next ‘quiet day’ we have on the lost legacy front.

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