The following is a remark that Ludwig von Mises made in his famous NYU seminar, as recorded in the notes of seminar attendee Bettina Bien Greaves on September 26, 1957:
{A}uthors who are commonly considered friends of freedom--and they are certainly very sincere and fine economists--want to tell us again and again that even Adam Smith and some of his contemporaries were in favor of interventionism. Such a book was already written 60 years ago by the last, i.e., the youngest, student of Carl Menger, Richard Schueller. . . . Then 60 years after Schueller the same book was written by Lionel Robbins {The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Econoomy} and in between many [other] people wrote the same book. Their idea is, ‘Look how foolish you are, you anti-interventionists. Even Adam Smith was in favor of certain interventions. Why are you not? Do you want to be more orthodox than Adam Smith?’ To this I answer, ‘I am the liberal and not Adam Smith. The liberals are not some imitators of the heroes of the past. We have no scripture to interpret. The Wealth of Nations is not the bible of liberalism.’
N.B. Mrs Greaves’s interpolations are in brackets; my interpolations are in curly brackets.
