That's Entertainment!
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As Thurber said (I think/paraphrase?) "Only humor can safely approach the burning column of truth" so it is possible that the ~180 pages of O'Rourke can safely approach the 900 pages of the Wealth Of Nations.
You will either "get it" or you won't but I doubt *you* will ever pack so much info as O'Rourke manages into so few words and paragraphs so entertainingly - this trick is *only* possible with humour.
Thus any sort of critique cannot approach these columns safely so let the man speak for himself!
...For example, a passage from the aforementioned digression on silver:
Labour, it ust always be remembered, and not any particulare commodity or set of commodities, is the real measure of the value both of silver and of all other commodities.6
This can be powerfully condensed: 'Labour... is the real measure of...value.' In quoting Adam Smith,'...'is sometimes the most trenchant thing he said. And it may be that just such a trenchant ellipsis in The Wealth Of Nations was what sent Karl Marx off his rocker. Notice, reading Smith's original sentence, that no grand Marxist 'value theory of labor' was created. The more so because, three hundred pages later, Smith makes the same kind of argument about food grains: 'The real value of every other commodity is finally measured and determined by ...the average money price of corn.'7 Smith thus maintains that work (or something akin to it, such as our daily bread) provides a sensible index for determining how much other things are worth to us. Deciding whether to mow the lawn ourselves or pay the kid next door to do it - factoring in the likelihood that he'll eat us out of house and home at snack time and run the Toro over his foot, sue us, and we'll have to get a second job to pay the legal bills - is something everybody does all the time. Marxism, as various Marxist regimes have discovered, is something nobody ever does if he can help it. (Incidentally, if the labor theory of value were true, certain children would be less worthless than they are.)
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A book for burning
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I love books but over time I have come to think that book burning has been given a bad name. The problem is not books that you disagree with - they can be stimulating. Its books that are a complete waste of paper. They are rare but they exist. This is one. Rourke may be a top humourist in the US but he seems to know nothing much about economics, nothing much about Adam Smith and he is simply not funny here. What do you do with a book that is too bad to sell, pass on or give a way? Rourke does at least point out that Smith's view of the market is based on a moral theory of sympathy with our fellow humans. If you have bought this book you have my sympathy. If you are considering buying it I would opt for checking out a library copy. Mine is on the fire.
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A mixed bag
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I am a fan of P J O'Rourke's writing and sympathetic to his libertarian stance. Never having read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, I thought I could take a short cut by reading this. Overall I am not sure that I have achieved my original objective.
You are likely to be interested in economics to want to read either Wealth of Nations or P J O'Rourke. The rest of this review is written on that assumption.
Overall, the book is untidily written (particularly the first chapter) and for the non-USA reader, some of the references seem beyond obscure. The author fails to avoid getting between you and the subject matter. At times (thought not always) it is unclear whether we are reading about Adam Smith's opinions regarding economics or those of the author.
Which is not to say that the book is without merit, I think I know more about the topic than I did, P J O'Rourke's comment is often funny, it just doesn't obviously meet the objective of reading one into "Wealth of Nations"
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