Editors Note: This column was originally published in the March 27, 2024 issue of the Chronicle Progress.
The first economist, Scotland’s Adam Smith, had it right almost 250 years ago when, as writer Eric Schlosser notes in the foreword of an important new book by Iowan Austin Frerick, that “...merchants and manufacturers were ‘an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public.’”