The most influential economist: Adam Smith

Tutoring, travels, European intellectuals
Smith's tutoring job entailed touring Europe with Scott, during which time he educated Scott on a variety of subjects. He was paid £300 per year (plus expenses) along with a £300 per year pension; roughly twice his former income as a teacher.^[40] Smith first travelled as a tutor to Toulouse, France, where he stayed for a year and a half. According to his own account, he found Toulouse to be somewhat boring, having written to Hume that he "had begun to write a book to pass away the time".^[40] After touring the south of France, the group moved to Geneva, where Smith met with the philosopher Voltaire.^[41]

David Hume was a friend and contemporary of Smith's.
From Geneva, the party moved to Paris. Here, Smith met American publisher and diplomat Benjamin Franklin, who a few years later would lead the opposition in the American colonies against four British resolutions from Charles Townshend (in history known as the Townshend Acts), which threatened American colonial self-government and imposed revenue duties on a number of items necessary to the colonies. Smith discovered the Physiocracy school founded by François Quesnay and discussed with their intellectuals.^[42] Physiocrats were opposed to mercantilism, the dominating economic theory of the time, illustrated in their motto Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même! (Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself!).
The wealth of France had been virtually depleted by Louis XIV^[c] and Louis XV in ruinous wars,^[d] and was further exhausted in aiding the American insurgents against the British. The excessive consumption of goods and services deemed to have no economic contribution was considered a source of unproductive labour, with France's agriculture the only economic sector maintaining the wealth of the nation.^{[citation needed]} Given that the British economy of the day yielded an income distribution that stood in contrast to that which existed in France, Smith concluded that "with all its imperfections, [the Physiocratic school] is perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy."^[43] The distinction between productive versus unproductive labour—the physiocratic classe steril—was a predominant issue in the development and understanding of what would become classical economic theory.