Anti-free market thinking pervades academia, despite the fact that free markets have generated an unprecedented level of material wealth. Markets feed, cloth, and employ academics who haven't the faintest idea where the money comes from.

No one disputes the fact that monopolies capture an undue amount of wealth. But to launch a general attack on entrepreneurship is fatuous and offensive. I'm sitting here are my desk living that life right now, creating a product that, down the road, will indirectly make that smug academic wealthier. Maybe he should spend five minutes in the business world. He might learn something.

Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism