The Adam Smith Institute, abbreviated to ASI, is a Libertarian think tank based in the United Kingdom, named after one of the founders of modern economics, Adam Smith. It espouses free market and classical liberal views, in particular by creating radical policy options in the light of public choice theory, which politicians can then develop. Its president, Madsen Pirie, has said "We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they're on the edge of policy".
It was the primary intellectual force behind privatisation in the Thatcher era, and, with the Centre for Policy Studies and Institute of Economic Affairs, helped drive Thatcherite policy on privatisation, taxation, education, and health. Several of the Institute's policies have been adopted by the Major and Blair governments, and the ASI has also advised governments overseas.
The Institute currently advocates the free market by publishing books and policy proposals, advising foreign governments, calculating the British Tax Freedom Day, hosting speaker events for young people, and publishing a popular blog.
Read more about Adam Smith Institute: Influence
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“Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)
“What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.”
—Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)
“Whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organising it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)