Contributions of James Mill: Leader of the Philisophical Radical Movement

0:00Thank you very much. It was always a pleasure, and the last time I was here, and I take fond memories of it, was about three, four years ago, and I talked about Turgo, and this is a little different now that I was unabashed, and I am an unabashed admirer of Turgo, and I believe in virtually everything he said. This case is a little different. It's not that I agree with everything James Noe said, in fact, I probably disagree with most of it, but I find him a fascinating character, and these, especially these re-evaluations. So I think I was, if I had to term the title or talk of the paper over again, I'd say being no reconsidered. And the interesting, the fascinating aspect of them though, first place, the reputation until very recently, was that of a third-rate popularizer in philosophy of Bentham and in economics of Ricardo, This is part of Hugo Mena's form-blower for the two great men, and the interesting thing is that this is totally incorrect, and interestingly he himself is partially responsible for this image, he's cultivated this image, it's very unusual, I'll get back to that later, because it's very rare in the history of any thought, economic or anything else, where somebody systematically downplays his own contribution, usually the other way around,

1:23So, that's an interesting historical puzzle, why didn't you do that? The thing, one thing about milk, of course, start with milk. There's two types of, I'm going out on a limb here, I think there's two types of thinkers in the history of economics or any kind of sport. Given their total brilliance and originality and multi-faceted nature, you know it's very prolific, you wrote on every subject under the sun, virtually, and I'll get back to that later too, but within that framework of great thinkers, there can be two types, one type is clear, lucid, hard-nosed, Systematic, and you know exactly where you stand, you know whether you believe it or not, it's easy to find that.

2:22Consistent, in other words, constant on a fixed and constant star, more or less having the same views from early adulthood until the end of their life. That's one type. The other type is, qualifies everything he says, agrees with almost everybody. In other words, the capacity for almost any kind of thought or agreement changes its position every three or six months, so it's very difficult to figure out what he said, what he said another time, or this time, or that, or that. And there's two paradigmatic people, I'll just let you know, in both types. Type A is James Mill, and Type A is his very screwed up son, John Stewart. And the interesting thing is the reception accorded to James and John Stewart. James considered the superficial popularized and John Stewart considered extremely great.

3:15And one of the interesting things about John Stewart is an interesting article by The Market for the success of John Stewart Miller's principal. I don't want to get into Jon Stewart here, because he's not the topic, but the point is, an interesting question here, a powerful question is, to what extent was Jon Stewart most confused, and to what extent was he deliberately being receptive? and it's pretty clear from the Markey article, he's deliberately being the setter, the strategy, in addition I think he's being excused, but anyway, he's setter in this sense that he wanted his book to be the great book, okay, except as the definitive work for the economy, and what he did was to curry favor with a little group, so if you look at his, if you look at that book and his other writings, you think all of his writings together, It also provides tremendous fodder for journal articles and Ph.D.P.P. auditors and writers.

4:15Was Mill a classical liberal? Was he a socialist? Was he a communist? Was he a rationalist? Was he a romantic? The answer is a little bit, or none, or what else, who knows? And so it provides, you can have endless debates about what the true meaning of Mill was, what Mill was thinking before Harry and Taylor, after Harry and Taylor, and it goes on forever. I know people writing about what the James-Miller movement means, everybody knows what he means, it's very clear. So anyway, I expose my biases here, before I get into the substance of the thing. I admire the first type, type A, paraphrasing a friend of mine, my enthusiasm for type B is under strict control. At any rate, the basic thing here is that James Nell was a remarkably creative thinker and fascinating personality in economics and other areas, political theory, political activism and organization.

5:14In order to understand, well first of all I want to say that there has been a revisionist movement about mail and economics, particularly in the last 10 years or so, which I'm building on. Terence Hutchinson, a book on revolutions and fostering, I think that title was. This revision is an upgrading of Mill, a substantial upgrading. William Sweatt, is that how you pronounce this? Because I'm assuming it's Sweatt. Huh? Are they Sweatt? Okay.

5:59That's the thing with English names and who knows? William Sweet, and the two of them have some very interesting, you know, up-grading stuff, you know, and we take that and combine that with other stuff in political theory, Joseph Hamburger's two fascinating books written in the 60s, James Mill and the Art of Revolution, and Intellectualism and Politics, The Theory of Money and Credit is essentially about John Stuart Mill, really mostly about James Mill, and also includes the work on the Scottish Enlightenment system, done recently by Richard Shurer, a much more neglected work called Church and University of Scottish Enlightenment. William Thomas' book on philosophic radicals, when you put all that stuff together, you get a very different picture.

6:45You get a fine ass of the upgrading done by Sweets and Hutchinson, really only scratching the surface of what the mills would do. Okay, I think to understand Mill's first place, we have to go back to the Scottish Enlightenment in which he was born. It comes in as a tail end of the Scottish Enlightenment, This is one of the last of the Scottish Enlightenment people. The thing about the Scottish Enlightenment is that the sure points out what you've got is the titanic struggle, the Scottish Enlightenment itself was a product that looked more moderate within the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and flourished from about 1750 to about 1810, something like that.

7:36And what you have in this period, all the great names that you're familiar with such as Reed and so forth, and economics, sociology, Smith and Ferguson, Hume and Roberts and a whole bunch of others, These people were essentially the reception of human support. These people were in the power elite of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Church of Scotland and Scotland and England unite first in the late 17th century, finally in the early 18th. The English decided in a simple, irrational but crafty way, or I would say illogical but crafty manner, instead of establishing the Anglican Church in Scotland, They were doing it in Ireland. They established the Presbyterian Church.

8:27They established the Anglican Church. There were very few Anglicans in Scotland. They would have had a revolution on that. So therefore, they established the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. The Church of Scotland was, of course, run by the English Crown and the satraps in Scotland, the dukes and whatever, various dukes and urals, so to speak, and the ministers being appointed by the Crown. Now, what we have in other words, of course the universities in Edinburgh and Glasgow and the other universities were all church and state run. In other words, they were run by the British government and the Presbyterian Church, the established church. So that means we have a small group of very bright people headed by Principal Robertson, William Robertson, a historian and the moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland.

9:18I'm the president and chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, and with royal appointment, with a royal patronage, running the Church of Scotland. To the great dismay and horror of the mass of these Presbyterian masses who were very much opposed to that. I've got this thing, basically, to see if I can work with you. In Nevada, we're still stuck with the old blackboard chalk concept. There's a moderate versus the, it's been called various things, evangelicals is probably the best word for it.

10:05The Evangelicals were hardcore Calvinists, and they were the official orthodox hardcore Calvinists, and they were the ministers in the outback, in the boonies, of course most of Scotland was boonies, even now most of Scotland was in the 1750s. So, the Evangelicals were, I say hardcore, they were against an established church, especially established by Britain, and running people, and moving over them, appointing ministers to make this a heretic. The moderates had the power, they had the procedures appointed, and they had to control the Edinburgh and Glasgow, the major intellectual and financial centers, and the rest of the... The Evangelicals ran the rest of the Church, bubbling up from below in revolutionary spirit.

10:58Now the differences on religion were pretty strong. And this has been played up a lot. Namely, the Immense, the Moderates were indeed Moderates. In other words, it was Calvinist, but they were in favor of religious freedom, they were in favor of talking to atheists, for example, David Hume, atheists, atheists, whatever you want to call it, they were friendly to Hume, and that's another thing they did by the way, the Evangelicals were not in favor of religious freedom, they were fairly free market oriented in economics, as it was, but they were, when it came to religion, they were very hard nosed, I guess we can call them now social conservatives, that was very plainly, And so, but the moderates were not theists or atheists like David Gingrich. On the contrary, they were also hardcore Calvinists. They were one toleration and two much more culturally attuned.

11:57For example, I'll give you an idea. One of the moderate leaderships, you know, was put on a play, playwright put on a play. I was a very moral play, it wasn't like now. It was a very moral play teaching a Christian lesson and all that, but fundamentally, evangelicals said all plays by definition are you know, they're passionate, rule with reason and stuff and stuff and everyone goes outlawing. That's the kind of thing that was going on. But it's a mistake to think that Adam Smith and the other people were not really religious. and the more modern and religious freedom questions like drama and literature. So what we have is the, for example, when Smith published his Wealth of Nations, he sends a copy to Reverend Hugh Blair, who is a moderate minister, a moderate court, and Blair writes back and says thank you very much, I agree with, it's great to stop, but one thing I disagree with, you're much too friendly to presbyterate.

13:06There's only two kinds of presbyterian church. Because, uh, because it says in The Mortal Knight that somewhere there's something like, the kind of people in Europe are ministers of a presbyterian church. And later, having been a minister of a presbyterian church, disagreed, of course. It's a testament. So, that's the sort of thing, in other words, that these, we have to realize, you have a point here, that these people, Most of the moderates came from socially fairly wealthy families, this came from a family of high customs officials, a great point made by Gary Anderson, a policyman and an oracle.

13:51The whole family is sort of the heads of the IRS. And with them was a more honorable position than it is now. And social status. And most of these guys were sons of professors and things like that. James Miller, however, was born, coming in late in the picture, I think 1973, was born to a poor shoemaker. and he is not wealthy, the whole of the team maker is a patron that discovered him and paid for his education at the University of Edinburgh. He comes in and studies under Douglas Stewart, who was a real Smithian. In other words, Smith himself didn't have very many disciples. He wasn't teaching that long after he was in a big shot.

14:40Zugall Stewart, the succeeded Ferguson Professor of World Philosophy at the University of Bendingboro, was apparently an excellent teacher and charismatic leader and so forth, and some of the best professors, I think any professor from Badsud, 1785 I think to 1810, And at one point, in 1798, he was also a fan of Turgot, a fan of Condorcet and the class of liberals and libertarians in France. All these guys, by the way, read French, I think were important to note, familiar with French literature. And Scotland in this period was a home of the, it so happened that Oxford and Cambridge had gone into intellectual decline.

16:03When the anti-French terror descends upon England, England doesn't war with Britain, doesn't war with France and all libertarian types or laissez-faire types are considered pro-French or either arrested or repressed. By the way, his life of Adam Smith, the first biographer of the semester, written during the repression period, carefully avoids any kind of laissez-faire or anything like that.

16:48By the late 1790s and early 1800s, Stuart attracted a whole bunch of extremely bright students and disciples to become the Smithian movement in Britain. James Mill was one of them, McCulloch was another one, Henry Broom, Falkland Palmerston, Francis Horner, and a whole bunch of them. And a couple of years later, I think in 1802, they found, these two were found at the end of the review. It was very quickly put down as the big journal for economics in Britain. Another thing is that, another influence on James Mill, early intellectual life, was Thomas Brown, who succeeded first with the professor of law and philosophy, Ember, who himself was influenced by Tracey, who was frankly their leader of the Civil Ideologues, and the trend of J.D. Faye. And so, you see right away that James Mill was growing up as an Mils graduates, and the other guys graduate, and they find out by this time, by early 1800s, 1800s, whatever the period, a crackdown began, in the first place the intellectual leaders began to die out, the moderate leaders began to die out,

18:18The Evangelicals began to take over. By 1810, the Evangelicals took back whatever the Church of Scotland and then kicked out all the old people and made us to the heretics, including all the old people I'm talking about. James Miller graduated with an ordained Presbyterian minister. He couldn't find a parish, obviously, because he was a moderate, and he didn't need to mess with people like that. He was doomed to hell. So, all these guys left very quickly. They had to leave Scotland and went to London. And the Edinburgh Review, after a first year or so, was published in London.

19:03We find Mill, then, cast loose in London trying to make a living as a freelance writer, but he was now doing what was very difficult for him to carry, as it certainly was in that period, living by his wit to this day, and he starts and grades in economics, and I think he's already been influenced by Turgault and Patrese and others who have written on economics and political science and all the rest of it, and writes The 1904 writes a first economic essay, an essay on impolicy, about the exploitation of corn, and then commerce ascended in 1908, plus a lot of book reviews in between.

19:52You may want to pause to say about Mill in general, if you want to open that on. He wrote an enormous amount of stuff over his lifetime, books on economics, history, psychology, logic, methodology, whatever. Also journal articles on all these topics, also newspaper articles on all these topics, many of which he wrote. Also, he organized everybody, organized himself of course. He organized his wife, he organized his friends, he organized himself. The leader of a group of 10 to 20 members of parliament, the Photographic Radicals of Parliament and the organizer's kid, John Stewart. And I call him the padre type. He would have been known in the old days of the communist movement as a good bullshit.

20:37In other words, humorless, energetic, doctrinaire, organizing everybody, pushing the cords all the time at all places. And what happens in the course of all this, in the course of all this, becomes an atheist. But the interesting thing about Miller, and this is the same thing that happened, by the way, with one of my cherished group of people, the Progressive Economists of Social Science of the late 19th century in America. And these people, they all start as post-millennial pious, as proven bringers of God on earth, by governments who can eat, who government needs. They're usually either farm boys in Vermont or whatever, upstate New York, they come to college, they come atheist, they find out that religion is really scientific.

21:27So they keep the entire spirit, the formative spirit, the crusading spirit, stamping out sin, of shaking everybody up through government. The whole mentality of those, working all the time on them, don't give in, don't go to plays, all that sort of stuff, it all fits in, and it's the same sort of stuff that would melt. The late quote of William Thomas has a marvelous book called The Philosophic Radical, and he talks about how Mill, even though he became an atheist, he retained the grim puritanical and frustrating habit of mind of a prototypical Calvinist firebrand.

22:15This is why Mill, a skeptic in later life, always got on well with Protestant ascenders in church. He may have come to reject belief in God, but some form of evangelical he overlaid essential to him. Skepticism in the sense of non-commitment, indecision between one belief and another horrified him. Perhaps Mr. Capps was more standing just like Eugen. Before he lost his faith, his covenant faith, he condemned Eugen for his infidelity. But even when he had come to share that infidelity, he could see it undervalued. A class of skepticism that seemed to uphold the status quo was not an attitude of mind of Mill when it stood. I think he probably understood it a little too well. He didn't like it. So, crusading Neil for belief, organizing everything for the movement.

23:02And Mill, by the way, after he became an atheist, puritanically disliked and expressed his drama or art.

23:41and Human Action, like Benson believes, is the only pro-rational performance including calculating cost-benefit analysis. And interestingly, when he writes the history, he worked for 15 years while he was still a freelance writer doing other stuff. He worked on the history of British India. Massive work. It was so impressive that the Indian company immediately made him a high official and finally got his job for the first time in his life. and the Real Job Job of Income and he rises and becomes a top official, he's been in companies since his kid, John Stewart, to see him when John dies and the thing is that the way he, in the history of British India, he writes this whole history of British India without once thinking he even has to He was considering the idea of learning any Indian language, reading anything about Indian institutions, about businesses, and he couldn't understand any idea of businesses or asceticism or anything, life and military glory. None of this stuff could even last, because it doesn't fit with fractional, methodological analysis.

24:52So, the thing about Mill is that he was just a humble, he wasn't very humble in general, he was just a simple popularizer of Bentham, Bentham was his great god in philosophy, let's see what happened with Bentham. He meets both Bentham and Ricardo in 1808, a fateful year for him, after he published Summer's Offenders, and he moves in with Bentham as his private secretary. Bentham was a very wealthy individual, a inherited wealth, sat around writing all the time, and he scribbled, and he writes millions of words, and millions of words of Bentham are still not published until Bentham's scholars are still working on them, and he writes stuff that's a very unsystematic fact, and they and they have a full fleet of secretaries that transcribe them. Remember the old copiers, right?

25:45And the transcriber interviews and edits them a little bit, you know, in legible English. And Mill was his top secretary for a number of years, and the interesting thing is what they thought about his job. Each writer is his friend. Mill writes to one of his friends and says, he's such a pain in the neck. He's so unsystematic. He keeps writing on one thing one day and another thing the other day.

26:37the goal of Bethan's life has been carefully overlooked by Bethan admirers of religious and philosophical movements The whole goal of Bethesda's life was to plan up that con, some wonderful stuff on it, such as the Himmelfarb and Douglas Long's Bethlehem of Liberty, but Bethlehem of Liberty can only get the full picture. The Himmelfarb is a very assiduous population, I think, as far as the Haunted House is concerned.

27:23Anyway, that was a great project. He visited Russia as a brother, as an engineer, and he worked on some of his other sketches. This is a wonderful idea of the whole world basically under surveillance, the whole world of forced laborers living in a cell, surveyed and run by a warden with a one-way window to every person. They didn't have a TV set, but one-way mirrors so they could be seen at any time by the warden and they couldn't see whether the warden was looking at them or not. He wanted the whole world to be in a situation where everybody probably was under surveillance at all times, which was the best of my ideals. He's a pleasure-paying cow-killer.

28:09He worked at many editions of how the panopticon would be run, and of course the guy that worked 12 and a half hours a day, because 12 hours a day is literally only a half hour for lunch and he'd sleep on a hard pallet and not a mattress. The idea is to lower the cost as much as possible and increase the production. The best in mind apologists say it only applies to humane prison reports, it applies to everything, to workshop, workers, schools, everything is free. Estimates vary about how much of the English population you want to put in panopagazas, somewhere between two fifths and a third or a half. and be run with the perfect methamite efficiency, calculating all the costs, lowering the cost of the labor system.

28:58But the real hitch here, I mean the real punchline is that who would be the owner of the Panopticon? Bentham, the whole point was that Bentham would be the owner. Everybody has to be conscripted into his Panopticon factory. So he kept wanting, he kept urging just the Tory government to pass the bill,

29:47The triad of principles of democracy, laissez-faire, mutualitarianism, with democracy and mutualitarianism being the top rank. Okay, this is a point of why he's a Democrat. And here we have the basis of this. It's very interesting, fascinating. He was one of the, what I call, libertarian class conflict analysts. Very much like Dunlayer and Compton, France. I'm not sure whether he arrived at it independently or whether he read Dunlayer and Compton. Probably read, I know he read France, probably read that. And he had a sort of a typically simplistic, non-historical version of it, from the heart of it.

30:32and leaving out all the historical analysis that comes along with it. And basically it was as follows, that every country is run by a ruling class. The ruling class are a few people. There are two classes of societies. The first class are the plunder of a small number. They are the ruling few, capital F. The second class, those who are plundered, are the great number. They are the subject many, capital M. Pembroke were summed up in those positions. Politics was a struggle between two classes, the avaricious rulers and the retentive victims. Well, I suppose I did that now. Okay, so, at any rate, that was his position. And they said, well, this was true in all societies, in all countries, particularly Britain.

31:23He wasn't really interested in history. He lived in Britain in his day. It's certainly true that Britain has a hundred families, whatever they were, who were running the country. And the real, the great conundrum of government, the political science, how do you get rid of it? How do you eliminate the ruling class system? And he said that, oh, to take away the power, quote, by which the class of plunders proceeding carrying on their vocation has ever been the great Commonwealth government. He called the subject, many, the people. He's probably the first, I don't know if he was the first, one of the first analysts to talk about the people, the people's rules, the people's whatever. It wasn't Marx's rule, it was Mill's. And he had the people who were the rules, and the ruling class he called the special interest, or the sinister interest, as we term them. No. Sinister, special interest versus the rule, the subject. So what's the, how do you do, how do you curb them? His answer was this, the story toward the answer, quote,

32:15So, the people must appoint watchmen. Who were to watch the watchmen, of course? The great classic question of political philosophy. Who was the guard of the guardians? The people themselves. There was no other resource. And without this open state guard, the ruling people would be forever discouraged and oppression of the subject many. So how would the people themselves be the watchmen? Because as Denny says, the answer is universal suffrage. There's a lot of people electing representatives in parliament or whatever who will do the watching. That was the solution. I don't think it was a very good solution, but that was his solution to the problem. And he said the government of England in his day was, quote, an aristocratical engine wheeled by the aristocracy for their own benefit.

33:04And by the way, the reason, and I bring in John Stewart again, the reason why he educated his kid in this I don't really have a theory of education, but it's kind of interesting because I think most historians think he did it because he had a theory of education when he was a kid in the laboratory experiments on stewards. The reason he did this is because he changed his role as a cadre leader. He was an intellectual and political leader of the philosophical radicals, and he was the hope of anyone who believed in Britain and not the world, and it was him to be his heir, an electoral and political heir. That was the point. John Stewart was going to be his youth leader, his youth cadre leader, eventually succeeding him as the leader.

33:55And that's why the rigor. Well, either you could say that brainwashed a kid too much or else the kid wasn't worthy of the rigorous education, depending on your stance on education theory. At any rate, the kid, John Stewart, was his youth leader. What he'd do is he'd bring his friends, college chums, James Mill, the old man, James Mill was a charismatic figure, obviously, and he would convert folks and Dr. Mill first, and then James Mill, putting the ______ on a table, would convert them into philosophical radicals, and so, and one later million, later reminiscing about this said, James Mill taught me how to think and convert and change my life. This whole sort of conversion experience that you get nowadays is something way critical of that, you know?

34:51Those days, this deep conversion experience changes the life of James Mill. It's obviously very bright and has a cool system and he's attracted to it. So, Mill had a, the Marxists would later call it transition demand. He obviously knew he was not going to get universal support immediately. Transitionism was a reform bill of 1832. It was bringing the middle class into the representation. It's the middle and a brilliant stroke of precedent in political activism, organizing only the entire, orchestrates the entire agitation of the reform bill of 1832. It gets its pass. And it's really brilliant. It keeps the political chicanery engaged in it.

35:37And what happened was, he was of weak government, he realized that weak government was sort of slightly sympathetic, but really against it, but they were the moderates, compared to the Tories, who very much opposed any expensive suffrage. And he managed to get a whole bunch of newspapers under his control. Writers, newspapers, editors, we had the Examiner, which was originally owned by a Benthamite radical. The Morning Chronicle was edited by an old friend of his, John Black. Spectator was edited by another Benthamite. The Times at that point, all of the Times was friendly to the radicals at that point. We had some guy, York Birmingham, who was the editor of the Birmingham paper.

36:25And what he did was he orchestrated a party to get a rally to reform Bill 1832, something like that. A hundred guys would show up at the rally. And his male agent in Birmingham would report 10,000 people were there clamoring, threatening revolutions, and people would say, don't get the reform bill passed. And it was this kind of organized mendacity that, you know, a tremendous propaganda campaign, which we now call disinformation, that finally persuaded the way, yeah, we're going to have a revolution in our hands so we don't pass. The bill passed. It was all nonsense. It was going to have many levels. There's a mix of this. There's a mille-feuille control of propaganda, the press, propaganda organs, and they got the bill passed. And this is leaked by John Roebuck, his assistant, all of it, and his memoirs of history of how the reform bill was passed by 15 years later.

37:16He leaked this. He said, people didn't realize that only alleged leaders were really controlled by a couple of shadowing people. We're pulling the strings behind the scenes, namely for James Mills. And the interesting thing, in order to pave the way for this, it's typical of Mills, by the way. He wanted to do what the Marxists would call unify theory and practice. He's got to engage in mass campaign of lying for the good, in other words, to expand democracy. He's got to justify it philosophically. He writes an article, to locate a lie from where the end ends, and he says, while truth is important, there are special circumstances for which another man is not entitled to the truth, men he wrote should not be told the truth when they make bad use of it.

38:09This is typically a utilitarian argument, right? The guy is entitled to do only if he's going to make good use of it. Of course, it's up to the guy to decide on it, whether or not it's going to be good or not. It's up to the utilitarian person who's doing the true-telling, all the lying, to figure out whether or not it's going to make good use of it or not. So then he says, in politics, even more so, in politics, disseminating what he called long information, Long information is not a breach of morality, but on the contrary, a meritorious act is conducive to the prevention of misrule. In no way is there any man less entitled to the right information than when he would employ it for the perpetuation of misrule.

39:00Okay, so he gets the form bill passed, and he gets a group of about 10 to 20 people to form, and he has a tool. He couldn't learn to form himself, he didn't have the money. He had to work for a full-time zinnia company. They had these guys who were wealthier do it, and he was the head of the radicals of George Grosz, who later became a banker, later became a distinguished classical historian. and Grosz was sort of his abject tool. It's very interesting how this works. They're obviously known as the menace and charismatic force, they even know. And Grosz, according to the hamburger, Grosz was so inoculated as it were, that for him all of those victors, quote, assumed the force of sanctioned duty, he says, quote. It's great to be on position. I need to say something, somebody takes it as a moral duty to carry it out.

39:50The leader of the million circles, so long as Mises wrote, Harriet Lewin wrote, the imperious and assertive militant, was widely known as the queen of the radicals, and Cobden wrote, had she been a man, she would have been the leader of a party. Okay, so this is Mill of the Political Activists, Mill of the Political Theorists, and it all fits in, a little harmonious structure. To get some more to this strictly economic stuff, what was Mill's relation to Ricardo? Ricardo, first of all, I think we have to realize, Ricardo didn't know, he read out on Smith and Seaside Resort, it's very probable, I think he picked up a, go to the Seaside Resort, vacation resort, he picked up his book, and nowadays he picked up a gothic romance or a spinoff, and he picked up this wealth of nations and loved it.

40:55Conversion

41:25And Mill's relationship to Ricardo was out of a very nagging and forceful PhD mentor. You've got to write this, you've got to write this book, you've got to change this chapter, put that in, they have long walks together writing. Mill keeps correcting Ricardo's stuff and adding stuff and taking stuff out. Finally, Ricardo's book is finally finished. Ricardo wants to retire again. No, no, now you've got to go enter parliament. You've got to be a leader in parliament. He becomes a leader in parliament. He doesn't know anything, no puzzle to do, Ricardo did. So, and we put that in the context, put those general personalities and relationships with Ricardo that was a dominant force.

42:10Except that money went back and forth. I had to qualify for that. And then we find out the threats and sweeteners and tactics and so forth. So we find out several interesting things. We find out, for example, that Mill, the first guy who discovered Say's Law, brings it into English economics, tells it to Ricardo, so this is Ricardo of it. So Say's Law, a very important part of the system, transmitted from Mill to Ricardo in 1808. In his book in 1804, it turns out, which he wrote before he met Ricardo, Mill developed the basic outlines of the Cartesian system, the economic system, not as far as I know the Rett's theory, but firstly all the rest of the corn model.

43:01An example, a quick one on that, in his work in 1804, he is typically, of course, known as an oversimplifier, and sometimes to the heart of it, but also makes a very extreme point, taking terms of aggregates and assuming real on it. He's the one who stresses long-run equilibrium for the health. For example, in the extreme Malthusians, in other words, no longer is there a long-run tendency or a short-run tendency, even for a population that has been pressed on the food supply. The wage rate is always at the system level, period. You're always in long-run equilibrium. That's miserable, of course. The wage rates are always in the level of doom. I think Eugen says that, he says, for example, a statement by Miller here, No one will hesitate to allow the tendency of the species to multiply as much greater than the rapidity with which there is any chance that the food of the earth will be multiplied.

44:01And he says, Raise corn as fast as you please. Mouths are producing so fast they eat it. So you can't, no way to get out of this, no way. Population, he adds, is invariably pressing close upon the people of the system. And whatever quantity of food we produce, demand will always be produced greater than the supply. You're always in deep doo-doo, I love the president would say. Wage rate is at a certain level going down below it, and corn is assumed to be the surrogate for all food, and therefore the pipe, and I guess he has an incentive rent model, The pipe of corn is always going up because the land is getting poorer and poorer, the wage rate has to go up because otherwise you're going below subsistence level, and therefore the price of profit is always falling. That's the whole, really the outline of the whole business.

44:47early 1904, and it concludes there, it includes the money, the wage rate is entirely regulated by the money type of corn, that's as much, by the way, wheat, for those of you who don't know English, English have a cure in what they call wheat corn. Okay, so the profits have always been falling, it really has a whole bit, the rest are going up and the profits are always falling, etc, etc. By the way, in addition to that, he's the first Henry Georges, he's the logic of Ricardo, The Landlords are not productive, they capture the inherited power of the soil, and the Landlords are eating up more and more percentage of the product.

45:46Some record owners have carried a logical political conclusion that Mel Dove is in favor of a tax on land vaccine, but he knows he can't introduce it in England, it's ridiculous, not political, so he tries to introduce it in India.

46:16Not political. He tries to do this in India, helping to run the land-bound tax in India. He doesn't have the moral argument, Henry George has for it, but he has the economic, utilitarian version of it. And then we have what Sleet has done. I think he's done some great research here. He's shown that if you're left with the Ricardian system as being a product of mill and not Ricardo's, it seems that the only thing that Ricardo's got in terms of money and banking is the wealth and power of advantage. The trade takes place, the exchange takes place, the people who are most best at something or least worst at something are not just an absolute advantage.

47:03A great argument for free trade. And Sweden has shown that Ricardo was not interested in this and didn't care about it. He never used it, the power of the advantage of the mill, on the other hand, originated it in 1807, I think it was. I think in a book review of 1807. William Spencer, a young English physiocrat, therefore believed that only agriculture is important, who cares about anything else? The assumption that says a physiocrat's word, too. In 1807, he published a book called Britain Independent of Commerce. He says everybody's worrying about Napoleon's embargo. What's the matter with the embargo? It's great, who cares? Only agriculture is important, let's consume the stuff at home. And so in the sense of international trade, Mill likes his book review and his eclectic review, and expands them to his commerce incentive in 1908, and brings forth the law of comparative advantage.

48:01Well the interesting thing is, apparently Ricardo didn't care about it. Ricardo was not in favor of free trade, period. He was only in favor of free trade and importation of corn. You want to get the landlords off our backs, but they're back for these 20 years. In other words, if you do that, the lower the price of the corn imports, it means the wage rates can go down, and profits will increase for a while. So that's a capitalism fan. That's why Ricardo was a favorite. He wasn't a favorite three days in general. He didn't care about it. Mill did care about it. So Mill gets Ricardo includes with law of comparative advantage a couple of paragraphs in his book. And that's it. The final note on this thing is the thing we'll have presently for John Stuart Mill engages in his relationship with his father in an extremely peculiar way.

49:26John Stuart Mill, while his father is alive, pretends to be a hardcore million. writing, for example, he writes an article praising Bessler, signing his own name under it. At the same time, he writes an article under a pseudonym, attacking Bessler. That's sick. There's some inner duplicity at work. Anyway, after his father dies and he sort of falls away from the cause and everything, but in 1848 he wants to re-establish Millian doctrine, his father's doctrine. Most people say he wants to re-establish the Cardian doctrine. Millinger's about that. I think more and more of an inclusion. It's Phileo-Priotism at work. He's saying in final respects that low man means a trader, a youth, and all that sort of stuff. And he reestablished the labor theory of value, which by the way, I think has a chance to go into this, labor theory of value might be a Calvinist, the reason why Mises adopts this question, the reason why Mills adopts this question, the Calvinist heritage.

50:26Ricardo, of course, is not a Calvinist, if you see the mill, he was a little author of it, that's clear enough. And we established the labor theory, value of qualifications that go there, where the whole system of the old man is back. Except one thing, the monetary stuff. The place, the thing Ricardo really best covered was the monetary business cycle analysis, the monetary theory business cycle. Mill doesn't have that, Mill adopts the banking school version and in mid-1840 he takes the view and you think with his heritage he'd be a currency school person the cause of the bank credit expansion and the business cycle's inflation is the bank credit expansion, money supply, instead of that he takes the banking school view Money flyers, passers-by, the bankers, simply recipients of it.

51:16This is the cause of the business cycle really deep in trade, something about trade and industry, the cause of the deep demand for money. Bankers, simply passers-by, recipients of it. Well, it turns out, so it looks like an anomaly. Why is Mill taking his position to be the son of a sore father of his doctrine? Morris Proman, a recent article on HOPE, talking about Adam Smith, Mille is sort of a theme, Mille is sort of an appendix, there are only two pages, points out that Mille was an early, extreme version of a banking school person, and he was very interesting, the assistant of the general might now be you here. He called it the Real Bills Doctrine, it's really a banking school doctrine, a wild version of it, mainly that bank money is always voluntary, any excess of bank money over absolute minimum will be immediately returned to the bank, there's no problem, those are things that increase, don't worry about increasing money supply or over-increasing money supply, anything of that sort.

52:20There's none of that in this qualification about self-liquidating short-term credit or anything. It's a little scarply banking school doctrine published in 1808 in a review of a book by Thomas Smith, an Edinburgh review by James Mill. So now we've found that this sort of completes the picture of it. I think of John Stewart who's destroying affiliate appliances and destroying James Mill, including the banking school doctrine, which has not been known until now. James Miller was a partisan of that. He didn't write that much on money and banking.

52:55To conclude about James Miller, I think he's a fascinating character, a tough, fascinating and hardcore type. Why did he And this is more usual, I think, in history of law, when somebody keeps saying, no, no, I'm simply humble, whatever. Especially a person who obviously is not humble. Well, a friend of mine said, I was talking to a friend of mine, a historian about this, he said, look, why don't you look at the economic aspect of this? Namely, Mill was an impoverished freelance writer, Benson was extremely wealthy, and Recoy was extremely wealthy. And you're telling your wealthy buddies or patients or whatever, hey, you're the real master, you're the inventors, I'm just a humble servant.

53:44And that might be a cynical approach, but I think it's realistic. Knowing also the mill is a sort of set-up type anyway. The exception is good if it promotes good ends. So I think that's the, I saw the historical puzzle of that mill, and I think it would save the fascination of the character. I think it's more interesting, really, than John Stewart, if you're right down to it, because it's my personal bias. Thank you. Thank you for watching.