It’s been almost 240 years since Adam Smith wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. What have we learned in the years that followed? As I wrote in a previous post, we have learned that Adam Smith was basically right.

Government policies that misallocate resources and distort economic incentives make countries poorer than they otherwise would be.

You would never know any of this, however, if you depend on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for information about the state of economic science. In a column last week, Krugman assailed Jeb Bush’s goal of raising our rate of real economic growth to 4 percent a year.