Life's Pleasures Quote by David Ricardo

Ricardo is doing something deceptively sharp here: treating “the facility of obtaining food” not as a humanitarian milestone, but as a lever in capitalism’s internal mechanics. Food isn’t framed as nourishment; it’s an input that disciplines wages. When subsistence gets cheaper, employers can pay less without provoking collapse. That’s the first benefit: profits rise because labor costs fall relative to output.

The second benefit is the ideological sweetener. Cheaper food also means a larger pile of “consumable commodities” can circulate. Workers and capitalists alike can buy more stuff; the economy looks healthier, busier, more modern. Ricardo’s subtext is that rising material plenty doesn’t automatically mean rising worker power. Abundance can coexist with intensified extraction.

Context matters. Writing in early industrial Britain, Ricardo is arguing against the Corn Laws, which kept grain prices high through protectionism. The anti-Corn-Law case often wore a moral costume (cheaper bread for the people). Ricardo’s version is colder and, precisely for that reason, revealing: he makes the elite case for free trade using elite incentives. Lower food prices don’t just relieve hunger; they reallocate income from landowners (who benefit from high rents) toward industrial capitalists (who benefit from lower wages and higher profits).

What makes the line work is its blunt double-entry bookkeeping of human need. It strips away sentimental narratives and shows how “improvements” can be structurally biased. Progress, in Ricardo’s hands, is real, measurable, and politically loaded.