Adam Smith

Adam Smith (1723 to 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and economist whose 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations argued that a nation's wealth grows not from a fixed stock of gold and silver bullion, as mercantilist doctrine held, but from the productive division of labour and free exchange coordinated by competitive markets acting as an invisible hand, with government confined to a limited set of public functions such as defence, justice and certain public works. He is conventionally treated as the founding theorist of both classical economics and laissez-faire capitalism, though he also defended some government intervention, including public education and regulation of banking, that later self-described laissez-faire advocates would drop.