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Jeremy Bentham • Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.
“The value of a pleasure or pain will be greater or less according to several circumstances: its intensity, its direction; its certainty or uncertainty; its propinquity or remoteness; its fecundity; its purity; its extent.”
“Value in use is the basis of value in exchange… This distinction comes from Adam Smith but he has not attached to it clear conceptions… The reason why water is found not to have any value with a view to exchange is that it is equally devoid of a value with a view to use. If the whole quantity required is available, the surplus has no kind of value. It would be the same in the case of wine, grain, and everything else.”
“It must be stressed that any commodity whatsoever, as soon as it is brought to the market, offers an outlet to other products for the whole amount of its value. In fact, when a manufacturer has produced a commodity, he has an extreme need and wish to sell it, so that its value does not dissolve in his hands. But he is no less willing to get rid of the money vanishing by remaining idle. Now, one cannot get rid of one’s own money except by purchasing some product.” J. B. Say
Malthus: "The question of a glut is exclusively whether it may be general, as well as particular, and not whether it may be permanent as well as temporary...[The] tendency, in the natural course of things, to cure a glut or scarcity, is no more a proof that such evils have never existed, than the tendency of the healing processes of nature to cure some disorders without assistance from man, is a proof that such disorders never existed."
Ricardo: “I may be asked what I mean by the word value, and by what criterion I would judge whether a commodity had or had not changed its value. I answer, I know no other criterion of a thing being dear or cheap buy by the sacrifices of labour made to obtain it”
Ricardo: “The effective demand for labour must depend upon the increase of that part of capital, in which the wages of labour are paid… - to the capitalist it can be of no importance whether his capital consists of fixed or of circulating capital, but it is of the greatest importance to those who live by the wages of labour; they are greatly interested in increasing the gross revenue, as it is on the gross revenue that must depend the means of providing for the population . If capital is realized in machinery, there will be little demand for an increased quantity of labour”
