This post suggests that Elizabeth Warren’s “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own” is a deliciously ironic appropriation of Adam Smith’s insights about economic interdependence against the right.

But maybe– just maybe!– the fact that Adam Smith wrote the quoted passage, or the fact that free-market types love to quote Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” to the same effect, shows that market-oriented thought never denied interdependence, except in the hands of a few people who quote Rand at second hand. As I suggested in my post last week, the supposed Galtian self-creator is opposed both by the truth about our vast interdependence through the market and by the idea of our dependence on state-provided public goods. But that doesn’t mean that they’re the same thought.