Daily Inspiration Quote by David Ricardo

Markets, in Ricardo's telling, are allergic to easy money. The moment capital starts sprinting from one "employment" (read: sector) to another, it creates a temporary heat shimmer: profits look abnormally high where the money is landing. That premium isn't a reward for genius; it's compensation for imbalance. Supply hasn't caught up yet, competitors haven't arrived yet, capacity hasn't been built yet. The very visibility of the profit is what summons its disappearance.

Ricardo is writing in the early 19th century, when Britain is industrializing fast and finance is learning how to chase returns across canals, mills, overseas trade, and new manufacturing techniques. His intent is to describe a self-correcting mechanism at the center of classical political economy: capital mobility tends to equalize profit rates. If you let investors move funds freely, extraordinary returns are not a permanent feature of an industry; they're a signal flare that attracts imitation.

The subtext is quietly anti-romantic about both entrepreneurs and policy. It punctures the fantasy that there are stable "high-profit" niches waiting to be claimed forever. It also implies skepticism toward interventions designed to preserve those niches: protection and privilege can hold profits above the competitive norm, but only by blocking the very flow Ricardo treats as natural. The line doubles as an early diagnosis of what we'd now call "crowded trades" and boom dynamics: once the requisite capital arrives, scarcity rents dissolve, and yesterday's growth story becomes today's normal business. Ricardo makes that feel less like tragedy than like gravity.