Ideas from La Richesse des nations

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Sample Ideas

In the ancient Greek states and in Rome, social disdain for artisanal trades, legal exclusion of free citizens from them, and reliance on slave labour in manufactures hindered invention and the use of machinery, making manufactured goods, especially finer ones, extremely expensive compared to modern times.
The standard philosophical curriculum in most European universities—logic, ontology, pneumatology, a debased moral philosophy, and a short, superficial physics—was designed for training ecclesiastics rather than 'gentlemen or men of the world' and is ill‑suited to improving either understanding or character.
Experience shows that without an exclusive privilege, a joint‑stock company cannot long conduct foreign trade successfully, because successful trading under active competition requires constant, vigilant, and adaptive attention that joint‑stock directors are unlikely to supply.
Capital employed in the foreign trade of consumption gives only half as much direct encouragement to domestic industry as capital in the home trade and usually supports it more slowly, especially when the trade is roundabout and involves multiple foreign exchanges, though using gold and silver as intermediaries can reduce the domestic cost of acquiring foreign goods.
When the annual produce first appears, it naturally divides into a part destined to replace capital—provisions, materials, and finished work withdrawn from capital—and a part destined to constitute revenue as profit and rent; the capital-replacing part maintains only productive labour, whereas the revenue part can maintain either productive or unproductive hands, so any stock used to maintain unproductive labour is immediately withdrawn from capital and becomes stock for immediate consumption.
Because everyday language uses 'money' to mean wealth, even intelligent writers repeatedly lapse into the popular, erroneous notion that wealth consists in gold and silver and that multiplying these metals is the main object of national industry and commerce, despite formally acknowledging that wealth includes land, houses, and consumable goods.
Publicly endowed institutions for education not only corrupt the diligence of public teachers but also make it almost impossible for good private teachers to arise, thereby preserving useless and antiquated sciences that would otherwise die out under market demand.
Legal restraints on new vineyards in France, justified by a supposed scarcity of corn and excess of wine, indicate that viticulture there is currently more profitable than other cultivation only because law artificially restricts supply; without such restraints, the natural proportion of profits between wine and corn would be restored, and in fact vineyards tend to encourage, not hinder, careful corn cultivation in wine provinces.
The relative values of bread and butcher’s meat change over the course of agricultural development: in the early, 'rude' stage with abundant wild pasture there is more meat than bread, making bread dearer; as cultivation extends and wilds no longer suffice, bread becomes relatively abundant and butcher’s meat more valuable, raising the rents of pasture, including unimproved moors.
The same human disposition to barter and exchange both generates the observable differences of talents among professions and makes these differences socially useful by bringing the diverse products of individual talents into a common stock from which everyone can draw—unlike among animals, whose greater natural variety yields no mutual benefit because they lack exchange.