Murray Rothbard: Adam Smith was far from the Founding Father of economics

[Adam] Smith, far from being the founder of economics, was virtually the reverse.  On the contrary, Smith actually took the sound, and almost fully developed, proto-Austrian subjective value tradition, and tragically shunted economics on to a false path, a dead end from which the Austrians had to rescue economics a century later.  Instead of subjective value, entrepreneurship, and emphasis on real market pricing and market activity, Smith dropped all this and replaced it with a labour theory of value and a dominant focus on the unchanging long-run 'natural price' equilibrium, a world where entrepreneurship was assumed out of existence.  Under Ricardo, this unfortunate shift in focus was intensified and systematized.

If Smith was not the creator of economic theory, neither was he the founder of laissez-faire in political economy.  Not only were the scholastics analysts of, and believers in, the free market and critics of government intervention; but the French and Italian economists of the eighteenth century were even more laissez-faire-oriented than Smith, who introduced numerous waffles and qualifications into what had been, in the hands of Turgot and others, an almost pure championing of laissez-faire.  It turns out that, rather than someone who should be venerated as creator of modern ecnoomics or of laissez-faire, Smith was closer to the picture portrayed by Paul Douglas in the 1926 Chicago commemoration of The Wealth of Nations: a necessary precursor of Karl Marx.

~ Murray Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, introduction, pp. xi-xii