David Ricardo Quotes

Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold... has its natural and its market price.

The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.

There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits.

Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.

When it comes to jobs, jobs are just like products in the sense that the free market operates and sees that somebody gets paid what they're worth.

Think how modern economics presents work. Only labour that contributes to growth counts.

It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations.

The proposition of Mr. Ricardo, which states that a rise in the price of labour lowers the price of a large class of commodities, has undoubtedly a very paradoxical air; but it is, nevertheless, true, and the appearance of paradox would vanish, if it were stated more naturally and correctly.

In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee's lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price.

There is no real wealth but the labour of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race.

Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist.

Of course, it is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.

The payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

We ought to be opening up our borders to skilled labour from all parts of the world because [the state of the world is as follows: ] if we were to do that we would increase the supply of skilled workers that our schools have been unable to create and as a consequence of that we would lower the average wage of skills and reduce the degree of income inequality in this country.

I don't believe that unemployment is all voluntary, by anticipation of future wage movements or this sort of thing. I know you can modify the models by taking into account the indivisibilities, but I don't really think that people are voluntarily unemployed.

Since it is to the advantage of the wage-payer to pay as little as possible, even well-paid labor will have no more than what is regarded in a particular society as the reasonable level of subsistence. The lower ranks of labor will commonly have less, and if public relief were afforded even up to the wage-level of the lowest ranks of labor, that relief would compete in the labor market; check or dry up the supply of wage-labor. It would tend to render the performance of work by the wage-earner redundant.

Race baiters and discriminators may go underground, but they never move out of town.

Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was sufficient, and species may have been created in succession at such times and in such places as to enable them to multiply and endure for an appointed period, and occupy an appointed space on the globe.

If racism can't be shown to be natural then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.

Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.

Biologically speaking the Afro-Asiatic block is in the ascendancy - always remember that both Negro and White are minority groups - the largest race is the Mongoloid group.

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .

We want to get full value out of labour so that we may be able to pay it full value. It is use - not conservation - that interests us.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations [that is, unions or colluding organizations] of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual price.