"Land, in England, is valuable, because we have highly-paid artisans to consume the produce on the spot"
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Land only becomes "valuable" when someone nearby can afford to eat what it yields. Hume’s line is a neat inversion of the usual landed-country pieties: he refuses to treat English soil as inherently precious or divinely blessed. Its price, he argues, is downstream from wages.
The phrasing is doing political work. "Highly-paid artisans" is a provocation in an era when elites often framed high wages as a problem and cheap labor as national advantage. Hume turns that logic on its head: well-paid workers are not a drag on the economy but the mechanism that makes domestic agriculture pay. The crucial verb is "consume". Value is not stored in acres; it is realized at the point of purchase, and it’s realized "on the spot" when an industrial workforce concentrates demand close to the farms that supply it. That local loop is the argument.
Read in context, this fits the early-19th-century British fights over the Corn Laws and protectionism. Landowners liked tariffs because they inflated grain prices; reformers and free-traders countered that high food prices punished workers and stunted industry. Hume’s subtext: if you want prosperous land and a stable country, you should want prosperous labor. The landed interest isn’t the engine; it’s a beneficiary of an urban wage economy.
It’s also a quietly modern insight: asset values follow purchasing power. Today we say "density" and "effective demand". Hume says artisans with paychecks, and he makes the countryside’s worth depend on them.
The phrasing is doing political work. "Highly-paid artisans" is a provocation in an era when elites often framed high wages as a problem and cheap labor as national advantage. Hume turns that logic on its head: well-paid workers are not a drag on the economy but the mechanism that makes domestic agriculture pay. The crucial verb is "consume". Value is not stored in acres; it is realized at the point of purchase, and it’s realized "on the spot" when an industrial workforce concentrates demand close to the farms that supply it. That local loop is the argument.
Read in context, this fits the early-19th-century British fights over the Corn Laws and protectionism. Landowners liked tariffs because they inflated grain prices; reformers and free-traders countered that high food prices punished workers and stunted industry. Hume’s subtext: if you want prosperous land and a stable country, you should want prosperous labor. The landed interest isn’t the engine; it’s a beneficiary of an urban wage economy.
It’s also a quietly modern insight: asset values follow purchasing power. Today we say "density" and "effective demand". Hume says artisans with paychecks, and he makes the countryside’s worth depend on them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
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