There’s a reason you don’t see many Adam Smith ties in the faculty lounge. “Adam Smith believed there are few things that the government should do,” James Otteson of Wake Forest said at the Philadelphia Society’s annual meeting in Philadelphia last month. Otteson is the Executive Director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism and Teaching Professor of Political Economy at Wake Forest. He is the author of Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life. Nevertheless, Smith, the Scottish philosopher has inspired American scholars and sages for centuries. Thomas Jefferson recommended The Wealth of Nations as a worthy title for...