Jim Rogers has a Better Pick for President than Ron Paul

Asked who he would pick for President, of any person dead or alive, Jim Rogers said, Adam Smith. Boooo.

Which means Rogers likely hasn't read Murray Rothbard's take on Smith :

Adam Smith (1723–90) is a mystery in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma. The mystery is the enormous and unprecedented gap between Smith's exalted reputation and the reality of his dubious contribution to economic thought.


Smith's reputation almost blinds the sun. From shortly after his own day until very recently, he was thought to have created the science of economics virtually de novo. He was universally hailed as the Founding Father. Books on the history of economic thought, after a few well-deserved sneers at the mercantilists and a nod to the physiocrats, would invariably start with Smith as the creator of the discipline of economics. Any errors he made were understandably excused as the inevitable flaws of any great pioneer... 

'Adam Smith ties' were worn as a badge of honour in the upper echelons of the Reagan Administration.

On the other hand, Marxists, with somewhat more justice, hail Smith as the ultimate inspiration of their own Founding Father, Karl Marx. Indeed, if the average person were asked to name two economists in history whom he has heard of, Smith and Marx would probably be the runaway winners of the poll.

As we have already seen, Smith was scarcely the founder of economic science, a science which existed since the medieval scholastics and, in its modern form, since Richard Cantillon. But what the German economists used to call, in a narrower connection, Das AdamSmithProblem, is much more severe than that. For the problem is not simply that Smith was not the founder of economics.

The problem is that he originated nothing that was true, and that whatever he originated was wrong; that, even in an age that had fewer citations or footnotes than our own, Adam Smith was a shameless plagiarist, acknowledging little or nothing and stealing large chunks, for example, from Cantillon. Far worse was Smith's complete failure to cite or acknowledge his beloved mentor Francis Hutcheson, from whom he derived most of his ideas as well as the organization of his economic and moral philosophy lectures. Smith indeed wrote in a private letter to the University of Glasgow of the 'never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson,' but apparently amnesia conveniently struck Adam Smith when it came time to writing the Wealth of Nations for the general public.

Even though an inveterate plagiarist, Smith had a Columbus complex, accusing close friends incorrectly of plagiarizing him. And even though a plagiarist, he plagiarized badly, adding new fallacies to the truths he lifted. In castigating Adam Smith for errors, therefore, we are not being anachronistic, absurdly punishing past thinkers for not being as wise as we who come later. For Smith not only contributed nothing of value to economic thought; his economics was a grave deterioration from his predecessors: from Cantillon, from Turgot, from his teacher Hutcheson, from the Spanish scholastics, even oddly enough from his own previous works, such as the Lectures on Jurisprudence (unpublished, 1762–63, 1766) and the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).... 

Into this complacent miasma of Smith-worship, Joseph A. Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis (1954) came as a veritable blockbuster. Coming from the continental Walrasian and Austrian traditions rather than from British classicism, Schumpeter was able, for virtually the first time, to cast a cold and realistic eye upon the celebrated Scot. Writing with thinly veiled contempt, Schumpeter generally denigrated Smith's contribution, and essentially held that Smith had shunted economics off on a wrong road, a road unfortunately different from that of his continental forbears

Is Smith a guy we really want for president?

As for my choice for president from the universe of those dead and alive, it would be Ron Paul, but I do not make this choice lightly. I have a second choice.

I once asked Lew Rockwell what people didn't know about Ron Paul. He thought for a minute and then confidently said that they don't know how good a politician Dr. Paul is. Since then I have watched Dr. Paul from a "political view" and I have to say from the way he has been accumulating delegates to other moves he has made, he is indeed one very shrewd politician. I think he has moves thought out for the future that no one in the Republican political establishment has thought out, and that's what probably really scares the establishment.

Anyone who would want to be president and put the United States back on the track of liberty would have to have a very strong personality, the pressure on such a man to do otherwise would be enormous, and such a person would have to be politically shrewd person to know just how to advance liberty and take apart the state. Ron Paul has those traits. The only competition I think he would have from all political leaders, dead or alive, would be from Ludwig Erhard.

Erhard was a German politician and Chancellor of West Germany from 1963 until 1966. He is notable for his leading role in German postwar economic reform and "Wirtschaftswunder" (German for "economic miracle").

Richard Ebeling explains what happened while Earhard was economics minister of the American zone of the then divided postwar Germany:

A small band of German free-market advocates had survived the war. A leading figure in this group was Walter Eucken, who was a professor at the University of Freiberg. While restricted in what they could say publicly under the Nazi regime, Eucken and his colleagues had maintained a network among themselves with the goal of sharing ideas for establishing a market-oriented economy in the post-Hitler era that they all impatiently awaited. While intellectually isolated from other free-market economists outside Germany, they remained inspired in their thinking by classical liberals like Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, whose writings they read and clandestinely shared.

One of Eucken’s protégés was an economist named Ludwig Erhard. He was appointed economics minister in the American zone in Bavaria in 1946. For two years he used this position as a platform to advocate market reforms. In radio broadcasts he frequently exhorted the German people to accept that they had brought their current tragic circumstances on themselves and only hard work, savings, and self-responsibility could restore their prosperity and gain them a new place among the civilized nations of the world.

In 1948 the British and American zones were combined into one administrative unit, with Erhard as director of economics. In June he instituted a major currency reform to restore monetary stability and to end the inflationary after-effects from the Nazi period. Not only was a new currency put in place, but it was done through a process of reducing the money supply. In June 1948 Germans in the Western zone could exchange ten of the old marks for one new mark.

Shortly after this, Erhard introduced the other essential element of any successful economic-reform project: abolition of the price and production controls. On a Sunday, while all the Allied occupation authorities were out of their offices, Erhard announced on the radio that the next morning virtually all price controls would be abolished. General Lucius Clay, commander of American forces in Germany, called Erhard into his office and said, “Herr Erhard, my advisers tell me you’re making a terrible mistake.” Erhard replied, “Don’t listen to them, General. My advisers tell me the same thing.”

Hoarded goods in short supply suddenly came out of their hiding places now that they could be sold at market-based prices. In the second half of 1948 industrial production increased 46 percent from its June level. And a year later, at the end of 1949, that production was 81 percent above what it had been when the reforms had been implemented in the middle of 1948. After an initial spike in prices when the controls were abolished, by the end of 1950 the greater industrial and agricultural output that was offered on a more open market significantly reduced the cost of living. Germany’s economic-recovery path assured that well into the 1960s its rate of growth in output and productivity would place it far ahead of virtually all the other countries of western Europe, including those, like Great Britain, that had been victors in the war.

As Ebeling goes on to say, Erhard was not a full free market advocate. He believed in a "social market economy," which Ebeling correctly notes planted "the seeds of new forms of government control and corruption", but Erhard's first move of disbanding the price controls was a very important free market step. It's one of the very few real world examples of rolling back parts of the state.

Ron Paul understands free markets better than Erhard and is as good a teacher, if not better than Erhard. Dr. Paul certainly has the backbone to stick to his principles against pressure, just as Erhard had the ability to stand up to General Clay. With Erhard being able to create a German economic miracle, with a limited acceptance of free markets, one wonders what would have happened in Germany, if Erhard held the full free market views of Ron Paul, and one wonders what type of United States economic miracle would occur if after the decades of shackles put on the economy, the shackles would be removed one by one by a Ron Paul administration.

No need for a confused Adam Smith to run the country, we have the opportunity for the real thing right in front of us in a candidate running right now, Ron Paul. I can't think of a better qualified person in history