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I agree wholeheartedly with David Mitch. 
 
I would add that there is good reason to assign Adam Smith (or Plato, or 
J.S.Mill's political works) to freshmen -- and it is precisely because they 
have not yet really studied contemporary economics, and so have ingrained 
in them  a partial and (in some ways) a mistaken view of Smith, i.e., a 
view of Smith as filtered through contemporary economic theory. It is much 
easier to help the naive to see many points in Smith than to try to counter 
the layers of accepted interpretation of Smith that years of economics 
give. (Doubtless you do lose some central economic issues -- but you also 
gain some insights, I suspect.) 
 
(I write as a historian of political philosophy, not an economist; and in 
my intermediate modern political thought course I worry that some students 
who are well-trained in economics only see in Smith what modern economic 
theory accepts from Smith.) 
 
Peter G. Stillman 
 
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