Classical Economists vs Utopian Socialists
There are many ways that to govern a country. Obviously, officials run most countries, but what kind of system do they govern by? Some of the most important systems used today are capitalism, socialism, and communism.As a coherent economic theory, classical economics start with Smith, continues with the British Economists Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. Although differences of opinion were numerous among the classical economists in the time span between Smith's Wealth of Nations and Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, they all mainly agreed on major principles. All believed in private property, free markets, and, in Smith's words, " The individual pursuit of private gain to increase the public good." They shared Smith's strong suspicion of government and his enthusiastic confidence in the power of self-interest represented by his famous "invisible hand," which reconciled public benefit with personal quest of private gain. From Ricardo, classicists derived the notion of diminishing returns, which held that as more labor and capital were applied to land yields after a certain and not very advanced stage in the progress of agriculture steadily diminished. The central thesis of The Wealth of Nation
Charles Fourier, was one of the few unique utopian socialists. He confronts the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world with the earlier philosophers' promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness should be universal, of an endless human perfectibility, and the phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. Therefore any interference with free competition by government is almost certain to be injurious. But, in its theoretical form, modern socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great Utopian Socialists of the 18th century. The writings of Malthus encouraged the first systematic demographic studies. s is that capital is best employed for the production and distribution of wealth under conditions of governmental noninterference, or laissez-faire, and free trade. To explain this concept of government maintaining laissez-faire attitude toward the commercial endeavors, Smith proclaimed the principle of the "invisible hand": Every individual in pursuing his or her own good is led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers received their full wages all the time. And with all this the business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors. Malthus, on the other hand, in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population conveyed a tone of dreariness. Owen did not have restrictions, and as a result productivity began to decrease rapidly, and ultimately the factory lost money. Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that man's character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity; on the other, of the environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially during his period of development. He believed that technology was the key to the future, without service and technology society would not be able to flourish. He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a Manchester factory. They also influenced subsequent economists, particularly David Ricardo, whose "iron law of wages" and the "theory of distribution of wealth" contains some elements of Malthus's theory.
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