Knowledge is power : $b A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.Knight, Charles
Philosophy
Knowledge is power : $b A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.
Knight, Charles
Industrial arts; Industries
But if these common advantages, these public means of society, offering
so many important agents to the individual for the gratification of his
wants, alone are worth more to him than all the precarious power of the
savage state--how incomparably greater are his advantages when we
consider the wonderful accumulations, in the form of private wealth,
which are ready to be exchanged with the labour of all those who are in
a condition to add to the store. It has been truly said by M. Say, a
French economist, "It is a great misfortune to be poor, but it is a much
greater misfortune for the poor man to be surrounded only with other
poor like himself." The reason is obvious. The productive power of
labour can be carried but a very little way without accumulation of
capital. In a highly civilized country, capital is heaped up on every
side by ages of toil and perseverance. A succession, during a long
series of years, of small advantages to individuals unceasingly renewed
and carried forward by the principle of exchanges, has produced this
prodigious amount of the aggregate capital of a country whose
civilization is of ancient date. This accumulation of the means of
existence, and of all that makes existence comfortable, is principally
resulting from the labours of those who have gone before us. It is a
stock which was beyond their own immediate wants, and which was not
extinguished with their lives. It is our capital. It has been produced
by labour alone, physical and mental. It can be kept up only by the same
power which has created it, carried to the highest point of
productiveness by the arrangements of society.
CHAPTER V.
Common interests of Capital and Labour--Labour directed by
Accumulation--Capital enhanced by Labour--Balance of rights
and duties--Relation of demand and supply--Money
exchanges--Intrinsic and representative value of money.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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