Page "Nassau William Senior" Paragraph 32

In several instances he improved the forms in which accepted doctrines were habitually stated.

He also did excellent service by pointing out the arbitrary novelties — and frequent inconsistencies of terminology which deface Ricardo's principal works, for example, his use of value in the sense of cost of production, and of high and low wages in the sense of a certain proportion of the product as distinguished from an absolute amount, and his peculiar employment of the epithets fixed and circulating as applied to capital.

He shows, too, that in numerous instances the premises assumed by Ricardo are false.

Thus he cites the assertions that rent depends on the difference of fertility of the different portions of land in cultivation ; that the laborer always receives precisely the necessaries, or what custom leads him to consider the necessaries, of life ; that, as wealth and population advance, agricultural labor becomes less and less proportionately productive ; and that therefore the share of the produce taken by the landlord and the laborer must constantly increase, whilst that taken by the capitalist must constantly diminish ; and he denies the truth of all these propositions.