Sounds like Adam the Smith, to me.
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Max Sawicky)
To: "PEN-L (E-mail)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [PEN-L:5821] Quiz
Date sent: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 18:21:50 -0500
> 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."
>
