Daily Inspiration Quote by David Ricardo

Ricardo is doing something sly here: he sounds like he is praising “the prosperity of the commercial classes,” but the real target is the political common sense of his day that treated high grain prices as patriotic or morally necessary. In early-19th-century Britain, “corn” isn’t a quaint farm detail; it’s the price of survival, the wage baseline, the flashpoint of class power. This is Ricardo stepping into the Corn Laws fight and translating it into the cold grammar of incentives.

The intent is practical and polemical. He’s arguing that if you genuinely care about capital accumulation and “productive industry,” you should want cheaper food. Why? Because expensive bread forces up money wages just so workers can eat, squeezing profits. Profits, in Ricardo’s system, aren’t just personal enrichment; they’re the fuel for investment, machinery, and expansion. A “fall in the price of corn” is a backdoor way of increasing profits without a single sermon about virtue or thrift.

The subtext is a class diagnosis disguised as neutral economics. “Commercial classes” are the engines of growth; landlords, implicitly, are the drag. High corn prices look like national strength but function as a transfer to landowners via rents. Ricardo’s rhetoric works because it reframes policy as an efficiency problem: not “who deserves what,” but “what produces more.” It’s ideology with spreadsheets: a moral argument smuggled in as arithmetic, aimed at breaking the political spell of protectionism.