A Lesson in Economics

I have found in the higher parts of Scotland, men not defective in judgment or general experience, who consider the tacksman [middleman between the lord and the tenant farmer] as a useless burden of the ground, as a drone who lives upon the product of an estate, without the right of property, or the merit of labor, who impoverishes at once the landlord and the tenant. The land, say they, is let to the tacksman at six pence an acre, and by him to the tenant at ten pence. Let the owner be the immediate landlord to all the tenants; if he sets the ground at eight pence, he will increase his revenue by a fourth part, and the tenants' burthen will be diminished by a fifth.

Those who pursue this train of reasoning, seem not sufficiently to inquire whither it will lead them, nor to know that it will equally shew the property of suppressing all wholesale trade, of shutting up the shops of every man who sells what he does not make, and of extruding all whose agency and profit intervene between the manufacturer and the consumer. They may, by stretching their understandings a little wider, comprehend, that all those who by undertaking large quantities of manufacture, and by affording employment to many laborers, make themselves considered as benefactors to the public, have only been robbing their workmen with one hand and their customers with the other. If Crowley had sold only what he could make, and all his smiths had wrought their own iron with their own hammers, he would have lived on less, and they would have sold their work for more. The salaries of superintendents and clerks would have been partly saved, and partly shared, and nails been sometimes cheaper by a farthing in a hundred. But if the smith could not have found an immediate purchaser, he must have deserted his anvil; if there had by accident at any time been more sellers than buyers, the workmen must have reduced their profit to nothing by underselling one another; and as no great stock could have been in any hand, no sudden demand of large quantities could have been answered, and the builder must have stood still til the nailer could supply him.

According to these schemes, universal plenty is to begin and end in universal misery. Hope and emulation will be utterly extinguished; and as all must obey the call of immediate necessity, nothing that requires extensive views, or provides for distant consequences, will ever be performed.

--pages 95-96