Lefties Don’t Understand the Market, And They Never Did

Our educated class is the class that lives furthest from the market economy. 

Christopher Chantrill | September 15, 2026

Last week I had some fun here with the economic nonsense of our DSA kiddies. For instance, DSA Wunderkind Mamdani proposed for New York City:

Free and fast city buses

Free universal child care

Today I propose that Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” is the economic equivalent of Albert Einstein’s E = mc2. Because Smith changed our understanding of the world in the same way that Einstein did.

The idea that the point of prices and markets is to transmit information from and to millions of actors in the market economy and coordinate their actions is a mind-blowing human discovery. To understand why, let’s ask Grok to “describe the understanding of markets before adam smith.” Its brief summary is:

Pre-Smithian understanding typically:

Embedded exchange in moral or political order rather than treating markets as a coordinating mechanism

Viewed trade as zero-sum (between persons or nations)

Identified wealth with gold, land, or the prince’s treasure

Expected the state, church, or custom to set or correct prices

Distrusted merchants, interest, and unlimited profit-seeking

See, back in the day nobody had Any Idea. Just like our lefty friends today. But today lefties still know that:

The market should be subject........

© American Thinker