Political Views of Classical Economists
As a coherent economic theory, classical economics start with Smith, continues with the British Economists Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. Although differences of opinion were numerous among the classical economists in the time span between Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), they all mainly agreed on major principles. All believed in private property, free markets, and, in Smith's words, " The individual pursuit of private gain to increase the public good." They shared Smith's strong suspicion of government and his enthusiastic confidence in the power of self-interest represented by his famous "invisible hand," which reconciled public benefit with personal quest of private gain. From Ricardo, classicists derived the notion of diminishing returns, which held that as more labor and capital were applied to land yields after a certain and not very advanced stage in the progress of agriculture steadily diminished. The central thesis of The Wealth of Nations is that capital is best employed for the producti
Malthus, on the other hand, in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) imparted a tone of dreariness. Malthus's main contribution to economics was his theory that a population tends to increase faster than the supply of food available for its needs. This theory contradicted the belief prevailing in the early 19th century that a society's fertility would lead to economic progress. Malthus's theory was often used as an argument against efforts to better the condition of the poor. Food, he believed, would increase in arithmetic ratio (2-4-6-8-10), but population tended to double in each generation (2-4-8-16-32) unless that doubling was ruled out by "natural selection". According to Malthus' natures checks and balances were positive: "The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." The forms it took included war, epidemics, pestilence and plague, human vices and famine, all combining to level the world's population with the world's food supply. Alth
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