[ Addenda]
[XI-490a] * "It will be observed that we consider the owner and farmer always as one and the same person... Such it is in the United States" (H. C. Carey, The Past, the Present, and the Future, Philadelphia, 1848, p. 97). "Man is always going from a poor soil to a better, and then returning on his footsteps to the original poor one, and turning up the marl or the lime; and so on, in continued succession ... and at each step in this course, he is making a better machine 3" ([p] p. [128-] 129). "Capital may be invested in agriculture with more advantage than in engines, because the last are only of equal whereas the other is of superior power" * (I.e.). "The GAIN from a STEAM-ENGINE" (which transforms the WOOL into CLOTH, etc.) * "is the wages of labour minus the loss by deterioration of the machine. Labour applied to fashioning the earth produces wages+the gain by improvement of the machine 3" (I.e.)* Hence* "a piece of land that yields £100 per annum"* will sell dearer than A STEAM-ENGINE which produces just as much per annum (p. 130). * "The buyer of the first knows that it will pay him wages and interest+the increase of its value by use. The buyer of the other knows that it will give him wages and interest minus the diminution in its vlalue by use. The one buys a machine that improves by use. The other, one that deteriorates with use... The one is a machine upon which new capital and labour may be expended with constantly increasing return, while upon the other no such expenditure can be made"* (p. 131).165
Even those improvements in agriculture which bring about reduced production costs and eventually a fall in prices, but which first — so long as prices have not yet fallen—[call forth] a TEMPORARY RISE OF AGRICULTURAL PROFIT, almost never fail must be again reduced, to admit of a return to the same system" (J. D. Hume, Thoughts on the Corn-Laws etc., London, 1815, p. 72).*
[XII-inside cover]* "Mr. Ricardo's system is one of discords. ...its whole tends to the production of hostility among classes and nations. ... His book is the true manual of the demagogue, who seeks power by means of agrarianism, war, and plunder" (H. C. Carey, The Past, the Present, and the Future, Philadelphia, 1848, pp. 74-75).* 166
[XII-580b] The proposition THAT CORN PRODUCES ITS OWN DEMAND, etc.,3
"casually" advanced by Adam Smith, later repeated by Malthus with considerable pomposity in his theory of rent and partly used as the basis of his theory of population, is very concisely expressed in the following passage:
* "Corn is scarce or not scarce in proportion to the consumption of it. If there are more mouths , there will be more corn, because there will be more hands to till the earth; and if there is more corn, there will be more mouths, because plenty will bring people" ([John Arbuthnot,] An Inquiry into the Connection between the Present Price of Provisions, and the Size of Farms etc By a Farmer, London 1773, p. 125).*
Hence
* "the culture of the earth cannot be over-done" * (p. 62).
Rodbertus' fantasy that seeds, etc., do not enter as an ITEM of capital,*5 [is refuted] by the hundreds of treatises, some written by FARMERS themselves, that appeared in the 18th century (particularly since the 60s of that century). But on the contrary, it would be correct to say that rent is an ITEM [of expenditure] for the FARMER. H e reckons rent among the production costs (and it does belong to his production costs ).
* "If ... the price of corn is nearly what it ought to be, which can only be determined by the proportion that the value of land bears to the value of money " * (I.e., p. 132).
As soon as capital takes possession of agriculture, the FARMING CAPITALIST himself regards RENT only as a deduction from profit and the whole of SURPLUS VALUE is for him ESSENTIALLY PROFIT: