1776

If you’re an American (and quite possibly if you’re not), the year 1776 is probably emblazoned as an incredibly important landmark in the history of government and political thought. My fellow Americans will immediately think of the Declaration of Independence, where a few men shockingly proclaimed that human beings didn’t need a king in order to run a nation.

These founders didn’t invent democracy, but they were the first to launch it at the nation-state level, and this experiment could hardly have had bigger repercussions.

Indeed, 1776 is a banner year for important documents in human history, but I’m not at all sure that the Declaration was the most influential or important tract to come out that year.

There’s another document that has done every bit as much to shape the world’s nations and the way its people live as the Declaration of Independence.

This other document is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

If you’re already in on the game, you’re nodding your head by now. You get…