Adam Smith?
At 06:21 PM 12/7/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Who said it? mbs
>
>
>"Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people
>to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconvenience to the society? The
>answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, laborers, and
>workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great
>political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part
>can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can
>surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the
>members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who
>feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a
>share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well
>fed, clothed, and lodged.
>
>The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it
>increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labor are the
>encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves
>in proportion to the encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence
>increases the bodily strength of the laborer, and the comfortable hope of
>bettering his condition, and of ending his days perhaps in ease and plenty,
>animates him to exert that strength to the utmost. Where wages are high,
>accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and
>expeditious than where they are low."
