Traduccion Ricardo Y Si Adiccion

Ricardo was encouraged to write a formal treatise on economics by the philosophical radical james mill. In turn mill´s famous son, the philosopher and economist john stuart mill(1806-1873), wrote principles of political economy. In this major work mill argued that the principles of competition were the bases of economic laws that could be outlined with precision and given universal validity by anabstract science. Yet also, by the middle nineteenth century, political economy was resuming that optimistic bent typified earlier by adam smith. For mill, the economic law of diminishing returns, in which additions to the labor working agricultural land were not met by equal additions to product, restricting productivity and growth, could in part be transcended in manufacturing, whereproductivity could be increased almost without limit. Mill argued that malthus´s pessimistic principle of population could be avoided by workers voluntarily restricting their numbers. With say and ricardo, Mill believed that there was no chance of general overproduction(and thus long-term depressions), although specific commodities might temporarily como into oversupply (so there could be shorttermeconomic fluctuations). Here again we see the liberal ideal of unlimited progress.

However, mill´s most significant contribution to classical political economy lay in differentiating science from values. That is, while the scientific laws of economics applied to production with the character of physical truths, the distribution of wealth was a different matter entirely, being a question more of humaninstitutions, as with laws and customs. Once things had been made, people could do with them as they pleased. Society could redistribute wealth through state intervention. Moreover, mill found the notion of the struggle for existence as an ideal of economic life to be merely a disagreeable symptom of one (early) phase of industrial progress. When more refined minds took over, such coarse stimulito economic action would be replaced by superior principles spread through education. Mill viewed the relations between workers and capitalists as an association of mutual suspicion, but thought that this antagonism could be relieved by profit sharing, and eventually avoided altogether through partnershios and worker ownership pf factpries. Mill thought that laissez-faire ( the practice ofnongovernmental intervention in the economy) should be the general rule, but allowed many exceptions, as with poor relief and factory legislation. Mill was a radical liberal who believed that capitalism would eventually give way to cooperativism. More extreme versions of these ideas were worked out by marx and engels, in many ways the final (critical) members of the classical school of political economy.(these more radical ideas are discussed in chapter 4).

Most accounts of classical economics end with mill. There was, however, an alternative economic perspective in the classical tradition presented by friedrich list (1789-1846), a journalist who lived in the united states and france for a decade after being repeatedly imprisoned for writing about his ideas in his native Germany. List agreedwith the principle of free trade proposed by the classical economists. But he thought that free trade presupposed a condition of eternal peace and a single set of laws for a world that had yet to come into existence. He argued that under the actually existing conditions, in which Britain dominated the world´s manufacturing industry, free trade would bring not a “universal republic” of equalcountries, but “ universal subjection of the less advanced nations to the supremacy of the predominant manufacturing, commercial and naval power”. He further argued that a universal republic of national powers recognizing each other´s rights, and a situation in which free trade could confer the same advantages to all participants, could only come about when a large number of nationalities had reached...