If I had I would have puked and gone on to something productive. I don't know how much I agree with the widely agreed upon idea that Adam Smith influenced the Founding Fathers. It was an age before capitalism. Historian Eric Foner's "Tom Paine and Revolutionary America" portrays the colonies in the 1770s as barely aware of wage labor. It was an age of slavery, apprenticeship, artisans, and merchants. And the Founders were only about 1/2 in the merchant class. There were no banks in the colonies. There were no markets to equalize. Everything manufactured that colonists couldn't make was imported from Britain. Colonists could only export to Britain.
Current Autralian economist Steve Keen is squarely in the minority camp that equilibrium is a pile of doggy doo, and that banks are still not figured into economic theory. You have all these models of supply, demand, consumer, market behavior but no one mentions money - the stuff that makes the world go round.
As for capitalism, America was pre-indutrialization until the Civil War. Free market economics was highly influenced by Darwin's "Origin of Species" (1859). A generation later laissez-faire economists had a pro-capitalist bent. To quote Gemini: "William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) was a staunch 19th-century proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, arguing that government should not interfere with natural economic forces. He combined classical liberalism with Social Darwinism, promoting free trade, the gold standard, and the idea that industrial competition is a natural "survival of the fittest"."
I'm not seeing much capitalism in early post-Colonial America. Lack of government regulation around the world had permitted the slave trade, LLC exploration, plunder of resources and native populations, but iron and steel were the base of industrialization.
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