Paul Atkins Misreads Adam Smith and the American Founding

On June 30, Paul Atkins, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, stood before the Economic Club of New York and delivered a history lesson. With the nation’s 250th birthday days away, Mr. Atkins told his audience that the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” both products of 1776, rest on “the same conviction: trust the individual, not the institution.” America’s founding documents, he said, “in many respects, reflect Smith’s central themes,” and the founders, wary of concentrated power “whether lodged in a crown, in a parliament, or in a bureaucracy,” built around liberty a governing framework “as light as prudence would permit.”