Book Review: Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home
Mobility is Prosperity
It was in early 17th century England that Sir Edward Coke declared “a man’s house is his castle,” but castles in those days had little in the way of indoor plumbing, light switches, or climate control. Regardless, only the most privileged classes lived in them, and prior to the Renaissance, nearly everyone else was some sort of slave to landowners or husbands, servants to trade guilds, had committed to vows of poverty, or were highwaymen.
Of course, Coke was using the term “castle” as a metaphor that symbolized each person’s rightful domain of security and privacy. And not only are property rights and personal security mutually dependent, but they are existential to a civilized society. In fact, this helps demonstrate how far Western civilization in England had advanced since the Magna Carta of 1215. And the industrial revolution was just beginning!
Which brings me back to indoor plumbing, light switches, and climate control. A man’s house may be his castle, but according to Jack Ryan, John Tamny and their 2025 book, Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home, it is capital to the owner but not to society: “like every other important purchase, buying a home is merely a buy versus lease consumption decision.”
And not only is home ownership or renting a consumption decision, being the owner requires plumbing, electrical, roofing, and foundation expertise that is unique to certain tradesmen. The economic and practical considerations of home ownership are just the beginning. What Tamny and Ryan have done is to render the American Dream of homeownership into a myth.
That is no small feat - and they do it brilliantly with the principal economist of the American experiment - the Scottish Enlightenment’s Adam Smith:
It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but in continual increase, which occasions the rise in the wages of labour. It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing richest the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest.
It is here that the authors stake many valid claims. Production creates supply. Supply creates wealth. Wealth precedes demand. Markets create information. Efficiency lowers prices. Profits attract capital. Capital finds talent. And owning your home is not economic capital to entrepreneurs who “attain great wealth by quite literally mass-producing what used to be nosebleed expensive.”
However, Ryan and Tamny will open your eyes to the fact that owning your home is political capital to the incumbents who need to subsidize traditional voting blocs in their gerrymandered districts. Why? Because your mobility upward is their mobility out of power:
Movement within the zone of prosperity that is the United States is a big driver of individual prosperity. We need more of it, so artificial tax code barriers to the buying and selling of housing are harmful to those with the least.
In a mixed-economy welfare state, the natural consequences of the political bureaucracy are the corporate lobbyists on a mission for the regulatory capture of their government handlers. And as Ryan and Tamny illustrate, one of the largest and most costly is the National Association Realtors. Unlike every industry transformed by innovation and the internet, residential property transactions remain expensive and slow. Not only do high, regulated prices hinder the mobility of millions of people, but talented realtors are also penalized by the low volume.
More recently, with “affordability” the latest crisis manufactured by the merchants of political chaos, Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home is a refreshing take that puts great emphasis on your talents, your mobility, your time and your money:
Smith put the expansion of the capital base on a high pedestal in the economic hierarchy, after which it’s no reach to say that in the information age human beings are the ultimate capital.