Obviously, I was qualifying my statement, not portraying the whole
group as being pro-laissez-faire.  It appears that you are taking my
generalizations about pre-Smithians and taking those statements to
apply indiscriminately to Cantillon, the Physiocrats, and Turgot.  
This is a misunderstanding of what I am saying.

In any event, the relevant issue is not whether all of these pre-Smithians
are free-traders in their policy orientation, but whether laissez-faire was
advocated and defended on economic grounds prior to Smith; which relies on
the propositions that (1) economics was founded prior to Smith, (2)
economics rose to prominence in the public policy arena before Smith, and
(3) laissez-faire was advocated by pre-Smithian economists.

Strictly speaking, these propositions don't require that all
pre-Smithian economists contributed equally to founding economics,
popularizing economics, and using economics to support laissez-faire.
 Each of them had a more delimited, dare I say specialized role.

Even worse, you are so eager to seize upon what you found in Cantillon to
attack Rothbard that you haven't been paying attention to all of the
qualifications that I did include.  You'll note my previous mention
of how I excluded Cantillon from the list of single-taxers, and my
argument above about how I qualified the attribution of laissez-faire
views to this group.

"Economics was quite prominent in France and even in Scotland long
before Kant or Smith.  While the usual mythology is that Smith
and Ricardo founded modern economics, that honor really belongs to
Richard Cantillon.  His treatise written sometime around 1730,  
_Essai sur la nature du commerce en general_, is the first work to
demarcate the field of economics and give a systematic treatment of
the theory."

In my post of May 8th, I listed six of Cantillon's theoretical
accomplishments (one qualified), and you came up with a quote suggesting
that another one should be qualified.  After that, you came up with the
charge that I was mistakenly portraying Cantillon as a free-trader.
However, a quick look at these earlier posts on DejaNews will confirm that
I wasn't saying that at all.

It should be noted also that my purpose in introducing Rothbard's
analysis wasn't to champion Murray's entire world-view.  In fact, of
all of Rothbard's works, the particular volume I cited has the most
shortcomings from my own vantage point.  However, seeing that you and
Jimbo were perpetuating the Smith-as-founder myth in your discussion
of Kant's alleged influence, I thought it was necessary to point out
the existence of a prominent laissez-faire movement that preceded
Kant and Smith.

The notion that arguments must have full citations is more
appropriate to a one-way channel of communication (such as
peer-reviewed academic papers) because of the lack of any interactive
give-and-take between the author and most of his audience.  In the
typical one-way academic modes of communication, the author has to
anticipate all likely requests for factual sources in advance and
satisfy those anticipated requests in the original article, book,
etc., in order to give the audience an opportunity to verify the
facts for themselves.

In an informal group discussion, this procedure isn't necessary.  
In a Usenet format, requests for clarification, elaboration,
or support of one's argument can be done on demand, so it is
far more efficient to leave out references to such things until they
are requested. Moreover, there is no presumption that leaving out
such references means that one is basing their analysis exclusively
on primary sources.  When one is talking about a body of literature
as vast as the writings of the pre-Smithians and of Smith himself, it
is entirely reasonable to assume that one might be employing
secondary sources in his analysis.

There are far more grounds for expecting a regular on h.p.o. to have
read Rand (which I believe was the substance of Jimbo's complaint)
than there is to have read the whole corpus of 18th Century
economics, a task which even few professional economists have
bothered to undertake.

Also, while secondary sources do create the potential for
misrepresentation, they can also recreate an intellectual context for
the reader that otherwise might not be fully appreciated just from
reading a primary source in isolation.  If you think that the h.p.o.
audience needs to be coddled by warning them of every instance where
one is relying on a secondary source, one could argue with equal
justice that one ought to warn h.p.o. of every instance where one is
using a primary source without understanding the full intellectual
context and historical circumstances of the author when he or she
wrote it.

Indeed, one could hedge one's writing with all sorts of skeptical
reservations and disclaimers of this kind.  But what end is served by
doing so?  If my counterparts in a discussion are so weak-minded that
they aren't alert to the possibility of misrepresentations,
contextual changes in meaning, etc. or aren't able or willing to
track down possible instances of these problems, their criticisms are
not going to be worth much to me anyhow.