Wealth & Money Quote by William Petty

Petty slips a moral warning into what looks like cold-blooded accounting: treat people as the active principle of wealth, and suddenly state violence reads less like justice and more like self-sabotage. The line’s power comes from its almost mechanical logic. He doesn’t plead for mercy; he balances a ledger. Labor fathers wealth, land mothers it, and the state that kills or cripples its own laborers is, by Petty’s lights, liquidating its productive capital.

That framing matters in 17th-century England, where Petty’s “political arithmetic” was taking shape amid war, penal brutality, and the early modernization of state power. This is the age of transportation, impressment, and routine corporal punishment; bodies are a governing resource, and Petty insists they should be counted as such. His subtext is proto-population economics: human beings are not just subjects to discipline but inputs the state depends on to tax, to staff armies, to farm, to build, to trade. When the state maims them, it shrinks its own future revenue and capacity.

The metaphor of land as “Mother” quietly keeps property in its place, too. Petty isn’t attacking landowners; he’s complementing them with a more unsettling claim: land without labor is inert. That’s a subtle rebuke to policies that treat poor people as disposable. By making punishment a form of self-harm, he offers rulers a self-interested reason to restrain cruelty, translating ethics into incentives long before “human capital” became a phrase.