October 03, 2005
Adam Smith College

Excerpts from an article by Richard Ebeling of FEE:

Two merged colleges located in Kirkcaldy, Adam Smith’s birthplace in eastern Scotland, were recently renamed after the town's most famous figure. But the new name, Adam Smith College, has not sat well with 30 radical students who refused to call their campus club the Adam Smith Students’ Association. According to the Sunday edition of The Scotsman, as far as these student activists are concerned, “Adam Smith’s name is linked to exploitation and greed” and with “socioeconomic policies that work against the people.”

Instead of honoring Adam Smith, these students in Kirkcaldy have chosen to call their group the Jennie Lee Students’ Association. Who is Jennie Lee? She was a notorious socialist born near Kirkcaldy in 1904; she died in 1988. As a teenager she enthusiastically supported the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and participated with the socialist agitators who worked to see that the British government did nothing to undermine the budding “worker’s state” being built by Lenin. After graduating from Edinburgh University, she stood for Parliament in 1929, becoming the youngest member of the House of Commons and the first woman Labor Party member elected.

Though she was defeated for reelection in 1935, Jennie Lee worked with those pushing for the Popular Front movement against fascism under the global leadership of Comrade Stalin in the Soviet Union. After the war she was again elected to Parliament; in the 1960s she served as the minister of arts in a Labor government and was responsible for setting up the Open University, a hotbed of socialist radicalism.

HT: Wilson Mixon

Posted by E. Frank Stephenson at 04:55 PM in Economics  ·  TrackBack (0)

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. -Adam Smith

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