Overcoming Anti-Marketism.

• Author: Leef, George
• Position: Visible Hand: A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market

Visible Hand: A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market

By Matthew Hennessey 230 pp.; Encounter Books, 2022

Every so often, a person who was brought up to believe in big government and disdain laissez-faire capitalism breaks free of those ideas and grasps the tremendous virtues of economic liberalism. Thomas Sowell, for example, was a Marxist in his early years but was fortunate enough to have had some professors who got him to go beyond what he calls "Stage One" thinking.

The same can be said of Wall Street Journal deputy editor Matthew Hennessey, who grew up in a household that lionized Franklin D. Roosevelt. He went to college late and at first shied away from economics, which seemed to be both abstruse and frightening. But once he got into the subject--luckily with professors who explained it in plain English (they are increasingly rare)--he was smitten and decided to read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. That got him thinking like an economist and he realized how much of the logic of human action he had previously missed.

In his new book Visible Hand, Hennessey gives the reader an easily understood series of lessons on the miracle of the market: the beneficial consequences of liberty coupled with secure property rights and government that's limited to protecting freedom. Those lessons don't involve any statistics or mathematics; rather they involve choke, something everyone can understand.

Human nature and the market / Right from the start, Hennessey wants to disabuse readers of the idea that Smith was some monster who is responsible for most of the world's woes. He recommends that everyone read The Wealth of Nations, but since that isn't likely to happen, he presents the basic concepts Smith sought to convey.

The "invisible hand," for instance, is frequently attacked by those who demand interventionist policies. Hennessey points out that the phrase appears only once in Smith's great work, but it contains a profound insight into human nature. In a market economy, the way for a person to get ahead is by producing goods and services that other people are willing to pay for. The pursuit of self-interest thus leads to harmony and cooperation. To those who might credit Smith for inventing capitalism (or blame him for that), Hennessey replies that Smith's work was one of revelation: his insights into human interaction simply revealed how people go about their business. Because of that natural harmony of interests, no government...