American universities have spent fifty years turning free markets into a dirty phrase.
Now DeSantis just flew to Scotland and signed something that strikes at the heart of their monopoly.
Here's what he did inside Adam Smith's actual home – and why the academic Left is not going to like it.
Florida's Governor Took Free Market Education Global
DeSantis presided over the signing of a Letter of Friendship between Florida International University and Heriot-Watt University – right inside Panmure House, the Edinburgh home where Adam Smith himself lived and wrote.
The agreement is exactly what you'd expect from the man who built the most successful state economy in America.
FIU and Heriot-Watt will exchange faculty and students in the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Scholars will pursue interdisciplinary research on free markets, moral philosophy, and political economy.
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/2080267889454551200?s=20
And Heriot-Watt professors will serve as Visiting Fellows at FIU's Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom – a center DeSantis established with the Florida legislature in 2020.
"Adam Smith was the greatest economic thinker in history," DeSantis said at the signing. "His timeless principles of free markets, limited government, and individual enterprise remain just as relevant today as they were 250 years ago."
That's a governor who actually reads.
The Numbers Behind the Trip
DeSantis didn't fly to Scotland to take photos.
This is Day Three of Florida's International Business Development Mission to the United Kingdom – a mission built on the 2023 Memorandum of Understanding DeSantis signed with then-UK Secretary of State for Business and Trade Kemi Badenoch.
The results of that original partnership are already in the books: bilateral merchandise trade between Florida and the United Kingdom topped $4.1 billion in 2025.
Florida exports $1.3 billion in Florida-origin goods to the UK each year and imports $2.8 billion in British products.
The UK is Florida's single largest international investor.
https://twitter.com/FIUPresident/status/2080287816806760911?s=20
And this visit comes after two separate Scottish delegations already traveled to Florida earlier this year – meaning the relationship is moving in both directions.
Why This Matters More Than the Headlines Say
Here's what the mainstream media won't tell you about what DeSantis just did.
Harvard charges nearly six figures a year to teach kids that capitalism is a system of oppression.
Yale's economics department has spent decades producing graduates who go straight into government to regulate, tax, and strangle the businesses their classmates are trying to build.
These institutions have had a monopoly on economic thought in this country for half a century.
DeSantis just broke it.
The Adam Smith Center now has a formal pipeline into Heriot-Watt's Panmure House – Adam Smith's last home, and one of the most prestigious centers for economic thought in the English-speaking world.
The next generation of economists trained on the ideas that actually lifted billions of people out of poverty – instead of the ideas that kept them there.
That's not an academic partnership.
That's a direct challenge to the institutions that have controlled how Americans think about money and government since before most of our readers were born.
Smith published The Wealth of Nations 250 years ago – in 1776, the same year America declared independence.
That's not a coincidence.
The invisible hand and the right to self-government arrived together because they are the same idea: that free people, making free choices, produce better outcomes than any government expert ever will.
Harvard forgot that.
Yale forgot that.
DeSantis didn't.
Florida's economy grew from just over $1 trillion to nearly $1.9 trillion under his watch.
The state added more than 4.3 million new business formations since 2019.
AAA credit ratings from all three major agencies.
Ranked the nation's number one economy two years running by U.S. News & World Report.
That's what Adam Smith's ideas look like when someone actually governs by them.
And if the next generation learns those ideas from a center DeSantis built – instead of a campus that despises them – the Left's monopoly on economic thought is finished.
Sources:
- Florida Governor's Office, "DeSantis Marks Wealth of Nations 250th, Seals FIU Deal," Office of Governor Ron DeSantis, July 22, 2026.
- Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, "On Third Day of Business Development Leadership Mission to the United Kingdom, Florida Delegation Visits Scotland," FloridaJobs.org, July 22, 2026.
- Steve Forbes, "Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations' Celebrates Its 250th Anniversary," Forbes, March 10, 2026.
- Florida International University News, "FIU and Florida Lawmakers Establish Center to Study Free Markets, Economic Policy on a Global Scale," FIU News, April 26, 2021.
