Principles Of Political Economy
- Автор: Mill John Stuart
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
- Жанр: Политика
Электронная книга - «Principles Of Political Economy». Краткое содержание книги:
Beside discussing descriptive issues such as which nations tended to benefit more in a system of trade based on comparative advantage (Mill's answer: those with more elastic demands for other countries' goods), the work also discussed normative issues such as ideal systems of political economy, critiquing proposed systems such as communism and socialism.
Along with A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy established Mill's reputation as a leading public intellectual. Mill's sympathetic attitude in this work and in other essays toward contemporary socialism, particularly Fourierism, earned him esteem from the working class as one of their intellectual champions.
The law of rent, in the economic sense, operates in the United States as truly as elsewhere, although there is no separate class of landlords here. With us, almost all land is owned by the cultivator; so that two functions, those of the landlord and farmer, are both united in one person. Although one payment is made, it is still just as distinctly made up of two parts, one of which is a payment to the owner for the superior quality of his soil, and the other a payment (to the same person, if the owner is the cultivator) of profit on the farmer's working capital. Land which in the United States will only return enough to pay a profit on this capital can not pay any rent. And land which can pay more than a profit on this working capital, returns that excess as rent, even if the farmer is also the owner and landlord. The principle which regulates the amount of that excess—which is the essential point—is the principle which determines the amount of economic rent, and it holds true in the United States or Finland, provided only that different grades of land are called into cultivation. The governing principle is the same, no matter whether a payment is made to one man as profit and to another as rent, or whether the two payments are made to the same man in two capacities. It has been urged that the law of rent does not hold in the United States, because “the price of grain and other agricultural produce has not risen in proportion to the increase of our numbers, as it ought to have done if Ricardo's theory were true, but has fallen, since 1830, though since that time our population has been more than tripled.”[181] This overlooks the fact that we have not even yet taken up all our best agricultural lands, so that for some products the law of diminishing productiveness has not yet shown itself. The reason is, that the extension of our railway system has only of late years brought the really good grain-lands into cultivation. The fact that there has been no rise in agricultural products is due to the enormous extent of marvelously fertile grain-lands in the West, and to the cheapness of transportation from those districts to the seaboard.
For a general understanding of the law of rent the following table will show how, under constant increase of population (represented by four different advances of population, in the first column), first the best and then the poorer lands are brought into cultivation. We will suppose (1) that the most fertile land, A, at first pays no rent; then (2), when more food is wanted than land A can supply, it will be profitable to till land B, but which, as yet, pays no rent. But if eighteen bushels are a sufficient return to a given amount of labor and capital, then when an equal amount of labor and capital engaged on A returns twenty-four bushels, six of that are beyond the ordinary profit, and form the rent on land A, and so on; C will next be the line of comparison, and then D; as the poorer soils are cultivated, the rent of A increases:
Population Increase. A B C D 24 bushels 18 bushels 12 bushels 6 bushels Total product Rent in Bushels Total product Rent in Bushels Total product Rent in Bushels Total product Rent in Bushels I. 24 0 .. .. .. .. .. .. II. 24 6 18 0 .. .. .. .. III. 24 12 18 6 12 0 .. .. IV. 24 18 18 12 12 6 6 0§ 5. Opposing Views of the Law of Rent.
Under the name of rent, many payments are commonly included, which are not a remuneration for the original powers of the land itself, but for capital expended on it. The buildings are as distinct a thing from the farm as the stock or the timber on it; and what is paid for them can no more be called rent of land than a payment for cattle would be, if it were the custom that the landlord should stock the farm for the tenant. The buildings, like the cattle, are not land, but capital, regularly consumed and reproduced; and all payments made in consideration for them are properly interest.
But with regard to capital actually sunk in improvements, and not requiring periodical renewal, but spent once for all in giving the land a permanent increase of productiveness, it appears to me that the return made to such capital loses altogether the character of profits, and is governed by the principles of rent. It is true that a landlord will not expend capital in improving his estate unless he expects from the improvement an increase of income surpassing the interest of his outlay. Prospectively, this increase of income may be regarded as profit; but, when the expense has been incurred and the improvement made, the rent of the improved land is governed by the same rules as that of the unimproved.
Mr. Carey (as well as Bastiat) has declared that there is a law of increasing returns from land. He points out that everything now existing could be reproduced to-day at a less cost than that involved in its original production, owing to our advance in skill, knowledge, and all the arts of production; that, for example, it costs less to make an axe now than it did five hundred years ago; so also with a farm, since a farm of a given amount of productiveness can be brought into cultivation at less cost to-day than that originally spent upon it. The gain of society has, we all admit, been such that we produce almost everything at a less cost now than long ago; but to class a farm and an axe together overlooks, in the most remarkable way, the fact that land can not be created by labor and capital, while axes can, and that too indefinitely. Nor can the produce from the land be increased indefinitely at a diminishing cost. This is sometimes denied by the appeal to facts: “It can be abundantly proved that, if we take any two periods sufficiently distant to afford a fair test, whether fifty or one hundred or five hundred years, the production of the land relatively to the labor employed upon it has progressively become greater and greater.”[182] But this does not prove that an existing tendency to diminishing returns has not been more than offset by the progress of the arts and improvements. “The advance of a ship against wind and tide is (no) proof that there is no wind and tide.”
181
“American Political Economy,” p. 164.
182
Rickards, “Population and Capital,” p. 135.