So we had this extract in the Sunday Herald today.

I for one have never ploughed through anything by Smith, or come to that any of the "greats", and am therefore reliant upon the perspective, values, accuracy and good faith of those commentators who have.

O' Rourke's book looks promising, I must say, if the extract in the Herald is anything to go by.

A few gems follow: firstly, for our US friends...

Some acolytes of Smith might be surprised if they ever read him. He wrote that "the oppression of the poor must establish the monopoly of the rich", and that profit is "always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin".

For those persuaded of the need for a tax on land values, the following might indicate support from Smith....

Adam Smith was tough on the landed gentry: "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed."

He would have been amused to see the dukes and duchesses of England reduced to keeping circus animals and other attractions on their great estates and letting fat daytrippers waddle through their stately homes, camcording the noble ancestors on the walls.

But it was this nugget that persuaded me that Adam Smith would have been well at home in ET's occasional Anglo Disease series....

Smith was tougher yet on the very people who, in his time, were beginning to generate the wealth of nations that he proposed to increase. Despite his friendship with merchants and manufacturers in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Smith had a cool loathing for the class: "Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour.

"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits.

They are silent and regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

And as for the privatisation mania, Smith had no time for the East India Company's depredations in India...

And Smith was no enthusiast for the privatisation of government functions. Concerning the East India Company and its rule of Bengal, Smith wrote: "The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever."

Finally, and fairly crucially, was Smith's distinction between (acceptable - indeed necessary, in his view)"profits" and "pernicious gains".

Smith wanted "the establishment of a government which afforded to industry the only encouragement which it requires, some tolerable security that it shall enjoy the fruits of its own labour". Smith did not consider profits to be the same as "pernicious gains".

Now my own distinction between "acceptable"  and "pernicious" profits is that between those profits achieved by the producer, and those by the "rentier".

The reason I am hopeful that there is a way out of the deep hole the financial system is in, is that there are new forms of finance capital now emerging to replace the "pernicious" tools of finance capital - ie Debt and "Equity" - which are IMHO the direct causes (with private property in Commons) of the Anglo Disease.