Whenever I read something in one of these left-wing cultural publications like the Atlantic it always reads like a 12-year old discovering history for the first time, and then they talk as though the stuff they discovered is some kind of amazing gotcha, but which is actually stuff that literally everyone who occasionally reads right-wing cultural publications has heard a thousand times. And then they, invariably, misinterpret their new found knowledge for whatever political end they desire.

Anyway, Adam Smith was from the ruling, landed classes in Britain. He was a natural enemy of the capitalist classes, who were, at the time, fighting to overthrow them and bring classical liberalism and internationalism to the world. It isn't at all surprising that he had bad things to say about capitalists. What is truly interesting about Smith's work is all the good things he had to say about what capitalism was bringing to the world. He was simply describing what he saw at the time, which makes it extremely different to later philosophers who tried to both describe what they saw, and hypothesize some amazing future like seers.

As for this guys claim that today's globalization is like the mercantilism of antiquity, it really is just not a good take. They are almost diametrically opposite. The entire point of free markets and free trade is to put a stop to all the corruption that he mentions in this article. yes some still seeps through but it is a million times worse under mercantilism, as he does rightly recount. Just because some bad things still exist under today's free market economy, doesn't mean mercantilism and free markets are the same thing.