Produced by Fritz Ohrenschall, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Posner Memorial Collection (http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/)) +---------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's note: | | Corrections in the ERRATA section have been made | | and duplicate Chapter numbers are marked by | | asterisks as shown in the original text. | +---------------------------------------------------+ ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND TAXATION. BY DAVID RICARDO, Esq. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE-STREET 1817. J. M^{c}CREERY. Printer, Black Horse Court, London. PREFACE. The produce of the earth--all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the community; namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated. But in different stages of society, the proportions of the whole produce of the earth which will be allotted to each of these classes, under the names of rent, profit, and wages, will be essentially different; depending mainly on the actual fertility of the soil, on the accumulation of capital and population, and on the skill, ingenuity, and instruments employed in agriculture. To determine the laws which regulate this distribution, is the principal problem in Political Economy: much as the science has been improved by the writings of Turgot, Stuart, Smith, Say, Sismondi, and others, they afford very little satisfactory information respecting the natural course of rent, profit, and wages. In 1815, Mr. Malthus in his "Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent," and a Fellow of University College, Oxford, in his "Essay on the Application of Capital to Land," presented to the world, nearly at the same moment, the true doctrine of rent; without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the effect of the progress of wealth on profits and wages, or to trace satisfactorily the influence of taxation on different classes of the community, particularly when the commodities taxed are the productions immediately derived from the surface of the earth. Adam Smith, and the other able writers to whom I have alluded, not having viewed correctly the principles of rent, have, it appears to me, overlooked many important truths, which can only be discovered after the subject of rent is thoroughly understood.