
David Ricardo believed in Say's Law, that supply creates its own demand. Thomas Malthus believed that the wealthy would be producers all right, but that they wouldn't demand goods or services from all their money and instead save it up. For Malthus, this was a problem. Apparently, he didn't understand that capital comes from savings, and there will be demand for the savings of the rich producers by small entrepreneurs, and the price they would pay to have access to this capital is paying interest. That is, after all, what rich people want - a return on their savings. They don't usually stuff their money under a mattress and guard it with a shotgun. Anyway, Malthus proposed "unproductive consumption" like having a war in order to pump up demand, making sure that everything that was produced would be consumed. This sounds a lot like the Keynesian belief that "war is good for the economy". If so, why not skip the war altogether and just build an aircraft carrier, sail it out to sea, sink it to the bottom of the ocean, and repeat as the economy gets better and better? The entire notion that war is good for the economy is of course absurd. Would you rather have an economy that produces military hardware that will be destroyed, or would you prefer an economy where capital is used by entrepreneurs to create consumer goods like iPods, mobile phones, laptops, Playstations, high defininition TVs, stereos, and automobiles?
Thomas
Keynes
economics
Ricardo
David
Teaching
law
premiere_elements_7
Taylor
Malthus
say's
war
Timothy
Company
economy
evmazu