From time to time I enjoy catching up to the seminars hosted by the Santa
Fe Institute and shared on their Youtube
page. In this seminar Naomi Oreskes
(from Harvard University) discusses her recent book (written together with
Erik M. Conway) titled "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to
Loathe Government and Love the Free Market". This seminar (and the book, I
guess) dives into the historical context of how free
market fundamentalism became dominant
economic ideology in the US and the western world, in
general.
For me key points of the talk were that Adam Smith, who pseudo-economists in
Lithuania like to paint as free market saint, was on a
big fan of the "invisible hand". He wrote that regulation might be warranted
when the "natural liberty of a few individuals endangers the security of the
whole society". Providing a regulatory advice on dealing with reckless
banking practices of his own time:
The obligation of building [fire] walls, in order to prevent the
communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty exactly of the
same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here
proposed.
A few more comments clarifying Adam Smith's relationship with the free
market ideology can be found in this
article
by Jag Bhalla on evonomics.com.