A British lord’s warning to his American cousins on their 250th birthday

Tempers have had two and a half centuries to cool, so British Lord Daniel Hannan, a prominent member of the Conservative Party who has served in the European Parliament and is now a member of the UK House of Lords, visited his American cousins on their 250th birthday to remind them of the common patrimony that led to the unprecedented prosperity and dominance of both nations.

During a speech in Raleigh in late February at the 2026 Carolina Liberty Conference, Hannan reminded those in attendance of multiple British and Anglo-American figures from the Enlightenment era that — if we want another 250 years like the last — can not be forgotten.

He began by mentioning that the namesake of the city, Sir Walter Raleigh, was a native Brit who actually attended his same college. And of course, giving a nod to his hosts, the John Locke Foundation, Hannan made sure to note the influence of Locke on the philosophy of the American Founders.

But as the an adviser to the British Board of Trade and founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade, Hannan especially wanted to focus on another influential Brit that created a revolution 250 years ago — Adam Smith. Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” which, as Locke CEO Donald Bryson noted, enjoyed its anniversary earlier this week.

The book’s main genius was that it observed something that was somehow missed since the beginning of human enterprise: Markets work much more efficiently and successfully when they are… free. The term “free markets” is now very familiar to us, but at that time (and Hannan argues even until today), it was very counterintuitive to think that something as important as the economy works better when the mob is allowed to make what appear to be countless chaotic choices rather than with wise leaders organizing and directing the process.

Hannan said the “uncanny” nature of the theory “is why they need to be taught again in every generation, because people do not stumble to counterintuitive ideas on their own. The idea, for example, the most obvious one, that we are better off depending on strangers whom we don’t know and whom we might not like if we met them, right? That doesn’t come easily to a species of social primates. We’ve been adapted by a million years of evolution to expect leadership. The idea that we are richer and more secure if we concentrate on doing one little thing and become increasingly specialized as producers while becoming increasingly diversified as consumers. Well, that sits very ill with us.”

For most of history, every man was expected to be a generalist. They needed to be able to do some farming, to be a soldier, to be a carpenter and brick mason, to do some tool repair, and on and on. But this was largely done due to distrust of surrounding people groups, not due to its efficiency. Being a jack of all trades prevented most from becoming a master at any one.

To show this key insight of “specialization,” Smith uses the creation of a single pin as an example. Countless people, who often don’t even know each other and are sometimes enemies, unwittingly cooperated to make that pin, contributing their one area of specialization to the greater goal.

The American historian and scientist Jared Diamond, in his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” made the same observation a couple hundred years later (and won a Pulitzer for it), showing how societies that generalize remain poor and those that lean hard into specialization quickly develop.

Hannan used a funny recent example to further demonstrate this:

There was a guy on YouTube a couple of years ago, a guy from Minnesota, if I remember correctly, who set out to make himself a chicken sandwich from scratch. He milled the grain. He grew the wheat and ground it, and he turned it into flour. And he raised his own chicken and slaughtered it. And he curdled the milk to make the cheese and went to the sea to get salt and all that. It took him a little more than six months, and it cost him about $15,000. And by the way, he was cheating. He was cheating because although he milked the cow, he didn’t grow the cow himself from calfhood. And he flew to the sea. He didn’t design his own airplane to do that, right?

While specialization and the wider free market system has been shown, time and again around the world, to create human flourishing never seen before and products and services never imagined, its counterintuitive nature continues to put it in the crosshairs of various political and cultural movements, including the populist right’s new interest in protectionism and tariffs.

Hannan connected Smith’s economic revolution 250 years ago to the American Revolution that same year, saying they both relied on the key insight of limiting centralized power and strengthening the individual within an ordered system.

That was a little secular miracle that unfolded in the old state house in Philadelphia exactly 250 years ago. And I say this with real feeling. You might think it’s a bit odd as a British conservative that I’m coming here and hemming the praises of your founding fathers. But you know, in their own eyes, these were the ancient freedoms they’d been born with. In their eyes, they were defending their birthright as Englishmen against the innovations of an interventionist and foreign king, a German king. And the reason that they believed that they had those rights is because they’d been reading John Locke and others.

To maintain this system, we not only need to keep educating each successive generation on the counterintuitive foundations of our flourishing, but we need to make sure the rule of law remains in force. Hannan encouraged Americans to find leaders like George Washington, who held the freedom of his countrymen in such esteem that he walked away from power, an act that shocked absolute monarchs around the world.

Hannan concluded by saying, we need to elect leaders who will do the same, putting the rule of law above themselves and their ambitions:

Elevating the rules, like I say, doesn’t come naturally, but… it is the single biggest distinguishing feature. And it’s up to all of you to ensure that you don’t throw it away. A republic, if you can keep it. Can you, cousins? Can you? 

“A British lord’s warning to his American cousins on their 250th birthday” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.