Pretty common back then as well as today. Jefferson did it too. Or you could lose your head. This is not Karl Marx just not well known.
“The labour and time of the poor is in civilized countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury. The landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his exactions from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money. But every savage has the full enjoyment of the fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no usurers, no tax gatherers …. [T]he poor labourer … has all the inconveniences of the soil and season to struggle with, is continually exposed to the inclemency of the weather and the most severe labour at the same time. Thus he who as it were supports the whole frame of society and furnishes the means of the convenience and ease of all the rest is himself possessed of a very small share and is buried in obscurity. He bears on his shoulders the whole of mankind, and unable to sustain the weight of it is thrust down into the lowest parts of the earth from whence he supports the rest. In what manner then shall we account for the great share he and the lowest persons have of the conveniences of life? [Smith 1762 1766, pp. 340 41]
It took Thomas Piketty to bring back "rentier" into economics discussions. This rentier class has also benefitted from enormous transfers of wealth in the USA since 1980 in which worker productivity continued to climb but none of the gains went to workers whose pay remained mostly stagnant.
I am not up to speed on monetary policy yet. But I do agree with Ben Franklin about the Labor Theory of Value. Marx thought it was pretty neat. From his notes on commodities.
“It is a man of the New World – where bourgeois relations of production imported together with their representatives sprouted rapidly in a soil in which the superabundance of humus made up for the lack of historical tradition – who for the first time deliberately and clearly (so clearly as to be almost trite) reduces exchange-value to labour-time. This man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the basic law of modern political economy in an early work, which was written in 1729 and published in 1731. [7] He declares it necessary to seek another measure of value than the precious metals, and that this measure is labour.”
"By labour may the value of silver be measured as well as other things.”
George Gilder's 1981 book Wealth and Poverty was not only a shout out to free market economics, it also pushed the sophistry that capitalism was altruistic. The examples he used were ludicrous stretches trying to make that point
What I love about Adam smith. Here is a man who wrote one of the most influential books of all time and he lived with his mother until he was sixty. If someone made a movie about Smith the obvious choice would be Adam Sandler. The reason being that Sandler has perfected the “man-child” character.
The Ideological Fraud of Adam Smith.
Pretty common back then as well as today. Jefferson did it too. Or you could lose your head. This is not Karl Marx just not well known.
“The labour and time of the poor is in civilized countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury. The landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his exactions from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money. But every savage has the full enjoyment of the fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no usurers, no tax gatherers …. [T]he poor labourer … has all the inconveniences of the soil and season to struggle with, is continually exposed to the inclemency of the weather and the most severe labour at the same time. Thus he who as it were supports the whole frame of society and furnishes the means of the convenience and ease of all the rest is himself possessed of a very small share and is buried in obscurity. He bears on his shoulders the whole of mankind, and unable to sustain the weight of it is thrust down into the lowest parts of the earth from whence he supports the rest. In what manner then shall we account for the great share he and the lowest persons have of the conveniences of life? [Smith 1762 1766, pp. 340 41]
https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-ideological-fraud-of-adam-smith.html
It took Thomas Piketty to bring back "rentier" into economics discussions. This rentier class has also benefitted from enormous transfers of wealth in the USA since 1980 in which worker productivity continued to climb but none of the gains went to workers whose pay remained mostly stagnant.
I’m a Keynesian.😎
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800911004873
I consider myself an advocate for MMT Modern Monetary Theory
I am not up to speed on monetary policy yet. But I do agree with Ben Franklin about the Labor Theory of Value. Marx thought it was pretty neat. From his notes on commodities.
“It is a man of the New World – where bourgeois relations of production imported together with their representatives sprouted rapidly in a soil in which the superabundance of humus made up for the lack of historical tradition – who for the first time deliberately and clearly (so clearly as to be almost trite) reduces exchange-value to labour-time. This man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the basic law of modern political economy in an early work, which was written in 1729 and published in 1731. [7] He declares it necessary to seek another measure of value than the precious metals, and that this measure is labour.”
"By labour may the value of silver be measured as well as other things.”
Nice - great comment. Modern economists completely ignore the labor theory of value.
As to MMT- a quick read is Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth.
I read Michael Hudson. Heterodox Econ. I never took economics in school. But neither did all the guys we read.😎
Looks like I need to investigate it. 😇MMT
George Gilder's 1981 book Wealth and Poverty was not only a shout out to free market economics, it also pushed the sophistry that capitalism was altruistic. The examples he used were ludicrous stretches trying to make that point
What I love about Adam smith. Here is a man who wrote one of the most influential books of all time and he lived with his mother until he was sixty. If someone made a movie about Smith the obvious choice would be Adam Sandler. The reason being that Sandler has perfected the “man-child” character.
https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/the-american-founding-and-the-political-problem-of-wealth