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free to do so.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
shows us how the imagination can make us care about other people.
The Wealth of Nations
shows us how the imagination can make us dinner and a pair of pants.
    Nothing but imagination could justify Genesis 1:26: 'And God said, Let us make man in our own image,' certainly notour looks. Imagination may be our only distinctively human attribute. Animals detect with their senses everything that humans do and more. Probably animals think many of the same thoughts we do, at least from nine to five. When's lunch? Animals can love. For all we know a romantic pang goes through an amoeba's heart – or whatever single cell organisms have – just before it splits. But animals, whose complete insensitivity to vice and virtue is evident when the miniature schnauzer humps your leg, cannot sympathize, let alone do so morally. Nor can animals cooperate enough to build a civilization. Unless an ant heap is your idea of the Acropolis. 'Nobody,' Adam Smith wrote in
Wealth,
'ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.' 24
    Adam Smith did not think we are innately good any more than he thought we are innately rich. But he thought we are endowed with the imaginative capacity to be both, if we're free to make the necessary efforts.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
and
The Wealth of Nations,
read together, do provide a blueprint – though it's for the soul rather than society.
    Smith never made any religious claims about his philosophical project. In a footnote to part 1 of
Moral Sentiments
he wrote, 'The present inquiry is not concerning a matter of right, if I may say so, but concerning a matter of fact.' 25 Smith meant to show, as well as his 'mere inventions of the imagination' could, only what he called 'the plan and system which Nature has sketched out'. 26 Yet the design that Adam Smith drew was for nothing less than the mechanical engineering of the Holy Ghost.

CHAPTER 8
The Wealth of Nations,
Book 4 'Of Systems of Political Economy' Adam Smith Tackles the Chinese Trade Menace
    If a single practical reason for reading
The Wealth of Nations
had to be given, it could be stated in three words, 'global free trade'. Or, since there's a particular example of global free trade that alarms us more than any other, one word will suffice: China.
    Thinking about China seems to induce intellectual Chinese fire drills and cause otherwise clear-thinking individuals to fuddle themselves with calculations – harder than Chinese arithmetic – about what this, that, or the other thing has to do with the price of tea in you-know-where. We have been amazed and perplexed by China since
The Travels of Marco Polo
. It's so big, so populous, so … Chinese. And until the end of the thirteenth century we didn't even realize it was there.
    Of course we'd been trading with China, whether we knew it or not, since the time of the Roman Empire. But trade withChina remains a source of surprise and shock. It seems the Chinese are selling everything to us. And we are selling hardly anything to the Chinese. China is growing ferociously rich. And what will become of us?
    Panicky articles about balance of trade clutter the
New York Times
and other broadsheets. In 2005 I began tearing these items out of the papers and stuffing them into my pockets until I looked like something that was going to be burned in effigy (a fate not always undeserved by amateurs who write about economics).
    The United States imports a great deal more than it exports, due in large part to the China trade. At my house I see a MADE IN CHINA label on everything but the kids and the dogs. And I'm not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.
    In June 2005, the US quarterly trade deficit reached $195 billion. The
New York Times
claimed that 'the news reignited worries that the economy cannot sustain the growing level of global debt.' Importing all of our goods except for golden