Sorry to be pedantic, but what does Adam Smith have to do with neoliberal capitalism? Something tells me this guy has zero idea about what he’s talking about.

Adam Smith as the "founder of capitalism" is like Columbus discovering America, it is just simply a pop culture reference that nobody cares to correct at this point. So this is no more extraordinary than Americans that can't point to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran etc on the map.

But I think it is also possible that this is a deliberate tactic because neoliberals are all alive and ruling today, by shifting the blame to someone dead over 200 years ago maybe they hope to convince people that it is Adam Smith's fault and not the people in Wall Street or the Fed.

It is one thing to say things are bad or getting worse, it is another thing to start pointing fingers. It is quite possible he knows exactly what he is doing actualy.

Economist who hated rents would have loved the marketisation of everything.

Well this guy has definitely studied and understood his intellectual antecedents.

Neoliberal capitalist ideology is derived from the Chicago school of neoclassical economics in the 1970s

There are very obvious precursors to neoliberalism like Von Mises and then Hayek. Who also oversaw humanity annihilating nature in rapacious amounts that was only limited by the relatively smaller population size of humanity.

Adam Smith's vile maxim is pretty close to the basis of a lot of neoliberal thought too.

:100-com:

There was a some TED talk futurist guy a few years ago that said he was giving a private lecture to a bunch of silicon valley ghouls and one of them kept asking him for ways that they could control their security guards in the event of societal collapse so that their security people wouldn't just murder him and take the bunker. He didn't name names, but I always assumed it was Thiel.