OUTLINE OF LECTURES UPON POLITICAL ECONOMY

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Press of C.A. Bangs & Company, 1881 - 76 pages
 

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Page 37 - By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered...
Page 12 - Rent is that portion of the produce of the earth, which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.
Page 31 - It is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously, what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it : and like many other kinds of machinery, it only exerts a distinct and independent influence of its own when it gets out of order.
Page 40 - The actual price at which any commodity is commonly fold is called its market price. It may either be above, or below, or exactly the fame with its natural price. The market price of every particular commodity is regulated by the proportion between the quantity which is actually brought to market, and the demand...
Page 29 - ... degree of utility. How can we vary this degree of utility ? — By having more or less of the commodity to consume. And how shall we get more or less of it ? — By spending more or less labour in obtaining a supply. According to this view, then, there are two steps between labour and value. Labour affects supply, and supply affects the degree of utility, which governs value, or the ratio of exchange.
Page 25 - Labour, then, in the physical world, is always and solely employed in putting objects in motion ; the properties of matter, the laws of nature, do the rest.
Page 12 - Secondly, — -That in a state of society where self-restraint does not act at all, or only acts so little that we need not think of it, population will augment till the poorest class of the community have only just enough to support life.
Page 18 - moral right' implies the existence of certain circumstances, with reference to which a certain course of action is viewed with general approbation, and the contrary course with disapprobation ; that a ' legal right' exists where the one course of action is enforced, and the other prohibited, by that organised society which is called
Page 15 - ... the method of study which its profitable prosecution imposes. If asked to define political economy, I should say that political economy treats of industrial society. Its purpose as an analytic science is to explain the industrial actions of men. Its purpose as a constructive science is to discover a scientific and rational basis for the formation and government of industrial society.

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