While conservatives so furiously thump their chests and proclaim their patriotic concern for stopping the moral collapse of America, much of conservative philosophy comes from thinkers and philosophers of the British Empire, including some who lived at the time of the American Revolution and utterly detested the "rabble" in the colonies -- such as Adam Smith. In fact, The U.S. maintained a working war plan – RED -- to fight against Perfidious Albion right into the 1930s.

Who was Adam Smith? He was a tutor – at a very lucrative salary – of the stepson of Charles Townshend, who authored the 1760s Townshend Acts imposing importation taxes on several articles, such as glass, paper and tea, brought into America. Smith’s student was the young Duke of Buccleuch, who later in life was appointed to the Order of the Thistle, and to the Order of the Garter.

Wikipedia describes the latter as

an English order of chivalry dating from medieval times. It is the world's oldest national order of knighthood, and the pinnacle of the British honours system. Its membership is extremely limited compared to most modern orders, consisting of the Sovereign and not more than 25 full members.

(The Thistle admits only 16 Lords of the realm, besides the king or queen.) The Duke of Buccleuch played a crucial role in promoting Smith and Smith’s ideas later, in the 1770s.

So, Smith was patronized by the very highest levels of the British oligarchy.

Today, Adam Smith is seen as the father of Anglo-American capitalism. In fact, after the Americans won their independence, there were two opposing forms of capitalism that vied for domination through the entirety of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth. One was British free trade, the other was known as the American System.

Even a casual reading of Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, and Report on Banking reveals that Hamilton strongly believed that speculative excesses must be curbed to the degree possible, and credit steered to the productive enterprises that would develop and utilize the resources of the young republic. So, it was not exactly the free market of Adam Smith or Friedrich von Hayek that the Founders established. There was plenty of room for private enterprise, but it was not entirely free. The new federal government was explicitly invested with the power to “To coin money, and to regulate the value thereof.” This is a direct repudiation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, right there in Article I, Section 8.

It is only by eradicating the American System that the oligarchs have been able to regain control of the value of money, allowing free speculation. For example, according to the latest Quarterly Report from the Bank for International Settlements, dated March 2007, trading in financial derivatives alone as reach a level of $1,200.0 trillion ($1.2 quadrillion) every year. That compares to a U.S. GDP $12.456 trillion (from Table B-1 of the 2007 Economic Report of the President), and a world GDP that has yet to surpass $50 trillion.

So, conservatism has always been an oligarchical construct, nurtured and imposed to do battle with the notion that the common people can order and govern their own economic affairs. That’s what people have to be taught: that conservatism is designed to DESTROY the founding principles of the United States. Unfortunately, British Free Trade is so predominant today, that even progressives unthinkingly regurgitate its key tenets.

Regarding Riccardo, he was debunked as just another British oligarchical theorist by American System economist Henry C. Carey.

What is the problem with China’s spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year keeping their currency lower compared to the dollar than it would be normally? Chinese simply put a premium on the purchase of their goods in substitution for American ones. That sounds terrific, but it is not that much so. For a premium on Chinese goods is a gift from Chinese producers to American consumers, who can with their increased resources invest a greater amount of savings in improved education, that is, in the formation of human capital. At the end of the day, the Chinese government will have to spend the dollars they have so expensively purchased in order to send their youth to American universities. If China challenges the comparative advantage, say, by trying to make electronic kits, for instance, for which they possibly don’t have a comparative advantage, what they’ll simply get is another allocation of advantages, in which education is a new, higher advantage for America. And they will be worse off as compared with how they’d be in the free trade.

And what is the problem with the US’s pushing the dollar down - which worked against countries who weren‘t willing to massively intervene? Those countries are the Europeans, aren’t they? America simply puts a premium on the purchase of American goods and services, including education in substitution for European ones. Thus, Europe, which enjoys increased resources from trade with both China and America, will in a generation or two catch up the American capacity to produce science and technology.

And if China and America believe that their policies are the best possible ones, they’re welcome in their beliefs.