Eamonn Butler in Indianapolis: Adam Smith, in graphic novel form
Adam Smith has waited 250 years for a decent cartoonist. This week, at the Mont Pelerin Society’s 2026 Biennial Congress and General Meeting in Indianapolis (11 to 15 October, under the banner “1776: Liberty in Conversation”), Eamonn Butler explained how he found one.
The occasion was the launch of the ASI’s graphic novel of The Wealth of Nations, and Eamonn’s account of how it got made was characteristically modest. He knew nothing about AI or graphics. He learned on the job.
His method was to write a Hollywood-style script, feed scenes to Grok, and collect the wreckage. Adam Smith with two heads and three hands, shaking nobody’s hand, yielded the odd usable element. Eamonn traced those onto paper, a technique he cheerfully described as a disappointment to anyone under 40. A designer then turned the sketches into finished pages.
The hardest idea to illustrate was the invisible hand. It is, by definition, invisible. His proposed solution for a follow-up volume is two 18th-century academics boxing over how important it really is.
That story begins in a filling station. Eamonn’s parents ran one, his father worked 72-hour weeks, and his mother distrusted every police officer, politician and local “Major So-and-So”. At St Andrews, the Conservative Association turned out to be a libertarian society in all but name. Hayek, Friedman and Mill were argued over in the student bar, and classical liberalism won him over because it is consistent.
America did the rest. A tour of Tysons Corner shopping mall, with its 30 varieties of baked beans, was an education. So was a phone box offering a choice of carriers, after his professor had taught him that telephone competition was theoretically impossible. Working in Congress, he read 154,386 pages of regulation in a year. He also learned how the farm bill is built, with Republicans voting for the subsidies and Democrats for the food stamps. Everyone was happy, with the possible exception of the taxpayer.
Back in Britain, the ASI discovered public policy more or less by accident. A pamphlet on trade union power landed during the Winter of Discontent. A list of 3,068 quangos (quasi-autonomous government bodies), printed as a 12-foot scroll, made the front pages and got Eamonn summoned by the head of the Civil Service. The Institute had found its real talent, which was packaging ideas for the right audience.
Privatisation was the biggest result. The ASI coined the word, which Margaret Thatcher thought ugly. His regret is that the reforms were left half-finished. Successive governments never added the competition that was meant to follow, and the legacy statism lingered.
Smith, Eamonn reminded the room, is routinely misread. Yes, tradesmen conspire against the public. His very next paragraph blames the regulation that makes their meetings possible and necessary. Eamonn prefers “crony statism” to “crony capitalism”, because it takes two to tango.
On AI and central planning, he was unmoved. The same claim was made for market socialism, then mainframes, then the internet. None of them solved Hayek’s knowledge problem (the fact that the information needed to run an economy sits in millions of individual heads). He often does not know what is in his own head until he is standing in a shop.
Was he optimistic? Intellectually, yes. Personally, no.
Governments do not learn, he said, but people do, so the message must be repeated afresh for each generation. Many of the free-market enthusiasts in Indianapolis were young. That, he said, gives him cause for optimism.
The book costs £20, the first print run has sold out, and a free download is available online. The comic-book tie is not for sale.
