The True Theory of Rent in Opposition to Mr. Ricardo and Others: Being an Exposition of Fallacies on Rent, Tithes, &c., in the Form of a Review of Mr. Mill's Elements of Political Economy

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R. Heward, 1829 - Economics - 32 pages

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Page 7 - India, to sit on a mud floor in the shop of his forefathers. and retire to swallow rice with the condiment of ghee, — there would be some chance of the thing being brought to pass. But 'the crowning city' has determined, that her merchants shall be princes, and her traffickers the honourable of the earth; and they neither can, nor will, resist the award. The opinion of society therefore, is what in the...
Page 5 - No. 2 and 1. With the same population and no more, there can be no demand for any additional quantity of corn ; the capital and labour employed on No. 3 will be devoted to the production of other commodities desirable to the community, and can have no effect in raising rent unless the raw material from which they are made cannot be obtained without employing capital less advantageously on the land, in which case No. 3 must again be cultivated.
Page 6 - The Englishman will not live and bring up a family on potatoes ; because, though he may consent to live on them when he can positively procure nothing else, habit, custom, the opinion of those around him, have made it in his eyes contemptible, irrational, absurd, for a man to be living on potatoes when he has the opportunity of getting anything better.
Page 5 - The same effects may, however, be produced when the wealth and population of a country are increased, if that increase is accompanied by such marked improvements in agriculture as shall have the same effect of diminishing the necessity of cultivating the poorer lands, or of expending the same amount of capital on the cultivation of the more fertile portions.
Page 6 - In his hours of prosperity therefore, he will to a certainty solace himself with bacon, and most probably venture upon beef ; and as this absorbs a greater portion of his income in what he views as necessary to his individual existence, it proportionally reduces his disposition to burden himself with new mouths. If the Irishman had the prospect of all this bacon and beef, he would view it as convertible into potatoes for a family like a patriarch's. The Englishman thinks it but decency to swallow...
Page 11 - A ploughman puts his children on their guard against this sophism, by the homely illustration, that 'a mare is a horse, but a horse is not a mare.
Page 6 - ... first in their own proper persons, they will utterly refuse to multiply upon such diet, the effect of which on population is ultimately the same. And the causes of these differences of habit are to be found in every thing that has affected the past or affects the present condition of society, — in ancient institutions in modern improvements, in past and present laws, in battles lost and won, in reformations of religion, in the progress of science, in the manners of the higher classes, in the...
Page 11 - Such — with the exception of the limitation relating to monopoly produce — are the admissions of the author. It would be curious to know how he convinces himself, that this is true when the tax is demanded from the producer under the title of a tax on his commodities, and would not have been true if the same sum had been demanded from him under the title of a tax on his profits. The omissions are, First, The distinction into commodities which are produced under a monopoly, and commodities which...
Page 6 - These are specimens of the kind of fallacy involved. There is precisely the same nullity of proof, that what is quite true with respect to the concomitant circumstances when they happen to exist, is therefore the essential and inseparable cause, without which the principal phenomenon could not have taken place. When it happens, — or even if it always happens, — that there exist soils of various degrees of productiveness down to that which does no more than replace the expense of cultivation with...

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