India, June 11 -- 2026 is the year of two important global milestones: 250 years of the US and Adam Smith's cult classic Wealth of Nations. A perceived fusion of the two is the bedrock of the global economic order as we knew it until recently. Right now, a dialectic between a dogmatic belief -- it is unfair to put capitalism's recent failures on Smith -- in the invisible hand of free markets and the backlash from its politically radioactive waste in the form of a precarious and reactionary underclass in the US and most parts of the advanced capitalist world is pretty much sledgehammering this order to pieces. I have been using this as an excuse to wriggle out of my editor's multiple nudges to write on 250 years of Wealth of Nations. My la...