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Sir Ernest John Pickstone Benn, 2nd Baronet (25 June 1875 - 17 January 1954) was a prolific British publicist. He was an uncle of the Labour politician Tony Benn. Benn was born in Oxted, Surrey. As a civil servant in the Ministry of Munitions and Reconstruction during the First World War he came to believe in the benefits of state intervention in the economy. In the mid-1920s, however, he changed his mind and adopted "the principles of undiluted laissez-faire ". From his conversion to classical liberalism in the mid-1920s until his death in 1954 Benn published over twenty books and an equivalent amount of pamphlets propagating his ideas. His The Confessions of a Capitalist was originally published in 1925 and was still in print twenty years later after selling a quarter of a million copies. In it he rejected the labour theory of value and argued that wealth is a by-product of exchange. Benn admired Samuel Smiles and in a letter to The Times Benn claimed ideological descent from leading classical liberals:
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