Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey is describing an economy that breeds middlemen the way stagnant water breeds mosquitoes: not as neutral “service providers,” but as a growing class whose income depends on standing between people who make things and people who need them. The sentence is built like an indictment. “The system” is deliberately vague but accusatory, implying a machine with its own logic, not a series of isolated bad actors. Its “object” isn’t efficiency or innovation; it’s multiplication of intermediaries.

The key tell is moral vocabulary smuggled in as economic description. “Living on the product of the land and labour of others” frames intermediation as rent-seeking before that term had currency: earnings detached from productive contribution. Carey’s subtext is class-structural. As intermediaries proliferate, the producer’s “power” shrinks - bargaining power, political power, even the ability to keep the surplus they create. Meanwhile the “number of the last” grows: a dependent strata whose livelihood comes from skimming, fees, interest, and control of access.

Context matters. Writing in a 19th-century Atlantic economy reshaped by finance, railroads, and trade policy battles, Carey (a leading American protectionist) saw British-style free trade and creditor dominance as systems that drained value from domestic labor and land. The quote is less a complaint about commerce than a warning about institutional design: markets don’t just allocate goods; they manufacture social roles. When the rules reward toll-taking, society fills up with toll collectors.