Wooden Teeth & Romantic Scandals

I’ve been listening to an unabridged audio presentation of P. J. O’Rourke on The Wealth of Nations. It appears to be a relatively brief overview of the rather hefty tome by Adam Smith. O’Rourke is a satirist, libertarian and economic conservative who hails originally from Ohio. His early writings appeared in the National Lampoon, where he helped launch the careers of John Belushi and Chevy Chase.

To be quite frank, the book has not been a compelling read, but I’ve hung in there and there are some good sentences. And it is a much more entertaining book than the tedious nine hundred-plus page original, though the original has had far more influence than this book will have.

The reference to wooden teeth and romantic scandals is more or less a comparison of Smith to our founding father, George W. Neither wore big happy grins, nor did their personal lives offer much grist for the rumor mills. O’Rourke addresses this matter only because it seems proper to assess the private lives of public philosophers, though he suggests public figures in government ought not be subjected to the same scrutiny.

Adam Smith kept no personal diary so that unlike our modern public figures whose every life detail is summarized in Wikipedia we know very little about the man except a notation by Sir Walter Raleigh, which may or may not be reliable.

There was another interesting sentence about fluctuations in the price of silver over the previous four centuries, but all in all, as I approach the end of the book I am pretty much ready for the next read.