Daily Inspiration Quote by David Ricardo

Ricardo is doing something deceptively subversive here: he’s prying apart “price” from “prosperity” at the exact moment Britain was arguing as if they were the same thing. On its face, he’s describing a farmer’s incentive. Underneath, he’s taking a scalpel to the landed class’s political talking point that high grain prices are automatically good for the nation because they’re good for agriculture.

The mechanics matter. A farmer’s revenue can arrive as physical output (raw produce) or as money earned by selling it. That framing already signals Ricardo’s larger project: income is not a moral reward, it’s a distributional outcome. Yes, the farmer likes high “exchangeable value” (price), aligning him with the landlord who collects rent. But then comes the pivot: low prices can be “compensated” by higher quantities. Productivity can outrun price.

That clause is the quiet threat to the Corn Laws worldview. If output expands through better cultivation, technology, or bringing more land into use, the farmer may survive or even thrive even as prices fall; the landlord, whose rents are propped up by scarcity pricing, is far less insulated. Ricardo’s subtext is that policy should not freeze scarcity in amber to protect rents.

Contextually, this is Ricardo in the post-Napoleonic squeeze, when food prices, wages, and political power were tangled together. He’s rehearsing an argument that still stings: when a society confuses high prices with health, it often ends up subsidizing the people who own the bottleneck rather than the people who increase supply.