Adam Smith was stupid. That is why he is considered an economist rather than a canny Scot who had spotted a gap in the market and was supplying it in a highly professional and systematic manner- i.e. without bothering to use his brain.
In a country which has neither foreign commerce, nor any of the finer manufactures,
there will be warring tribes and clans
a great proprietor,
won't exist. Theft- particularly cattle theft- would be property. There may be inherited claims to territory kept up by local chieftains but there would be no 'proprietors'.
having nothing for which he can exchange the greater part of the produce of his lands which is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, consumes the whole in rustic hospitality at home.
Unless a rival clan attacks unexpectedly and carries away all the cattle. In that case there won't be much good cheer at the chieftain's table.
If this surplus produce is sufficient to maintain a hundred or a thousand men, he can make use of it in no other way than by maintaining a hundred or a thousand men.
If it insufficient, the hundred or thousand must either raid their neighbours or perish of starvation.
He is at all times, therefore, surrounded with a multitude of retainers and dependants, who, having no equivalent to give in return for their maintenance, but being fed entirely by his bounty, must obey him, for the same reason that soldiers must obey the prince who pays them.
If his retainers are shit at fighting, he himself will soon be killed or enslaved.
Before the extension of commerce and manufacture in Europe,
it was a shithole. First came the extension of religion- Monasteries and such like- and only then did the pall of darkness begin to lift. I suppose the Crusades played a part in this. But they imposed quite a high financial cost on some European kingdoms.
the hospitality of the rich, and the great, from the sovereign down to the smallest baron, exceeded everything which in the present times we can easily form a notion of.
It is easy enough. Your guys steal cattle and maybe grab some female slaves. You have a barbeque. Everybody's invited. But such potlatches become fewer and more far between as time goes by till a more commercial race finds that it can hire mercs from amongst your number and establish its paramountcy. This might mean that sheep replace your lusty warriors and you yourself become a 'great proprietor' who considers hospitality a virtue to be stinted to the needy but lavished on those richer or more powerful.
Westminster Hall was the dining-room of William Rufus,
His manners may have been rough, but his finances were sound.
and might frequently, perhaps, not be too large for his company. It was reckoned a piece of magnificence in Thomas Becket that he strewed the floor of his hall with clean hay or rushes in the season, in order that the knights and squires who could not get seats might not spoil their fine clothes when they sat down on the floor to eat their dinner.
Becket's father, though of Norman origin, was a prosperous merchant. It is believed he sold those 'fine' textiles for which his son, who rose as a commercial clerk and then was Lord Chancellor before making a lateral move into the Church, showed such tender concern. In other words, the London of Rufus & Becket was already commercia and concerned with foreign trade rather than autarkic and feudal.
The great Earl of Warwick is said to have entertained every day at his different manors thirty thousand people, and though the number here may have been exaggerated, it must, however, have been very great to admit of such exaggeration.
I suppose, the only sort of safety available back then, was safety in numbers. It was not so much the bread and pottage served in the Baron's hall which attracted you as the chance to sleep safely on the straw surrounded by the slumbering bodies of hefty men-at-arms.
A hospitality nearly of the same kind was exercised not many years ago in many different parts of the highlands of Scotland. It seems to be common in all nations to whom commerce and manufactures are little known. "I have seen," says Doctor Pocock, "an Arabian chief dine in the streets of a town where he had come to sell his cattle, and invite all passengers, even common beggars, to sit down with him and partake of his banquet."
Wealthy merchants in the biggest cities would be even more generous in terms of endowing seminaries and alms-houses or even contributing funds for the construction of great cathedrals or mosques. The hospitality of the merchant guild, or the monastery, might throw that of the Baron, or even the King, into the shade. But, in England, a point was reached where great Princes preferred to put up in commercial Inns rather than seek hospitality from their royal cousins. The problem with 'rude plenty' is that there is plenty to be rude about. Why not stay in a nice Inn and pay extra for dainty dishes and fine linen?
The occupiers of land were in every respect as dependent upon the great proprietor as his retainers.
Under serfdom, they were more than dependent. They were subject to punishment if they ran away.
Even such of them as were not in a state of villanage were tenants at will, who paid a rent in no respect equivalent to the subsistence which the land afforded them. A crown, half a crown, a sheep, a lamb, was some years ago in the highlands of Scotland a common rent for lands which maintained a family.
This was tribute as an acknowledgment of a duty of fealty.
In some places it is so at this day; nor will money at present purchase a greater quantity of commodities there than in other places. In a country where the surplus produce of a large estate must be consumed upon the estate itself,
there is no point having a surplus if that but invites predation.
it will frequently be more convenient for the proprietor that part of it be consumed at a distance from his own house provided they who consume it are as dependent upon him as either his retainers or his menial servants.
That's one way to do things. But you could also have a caste system. The aristocracy may be of foreign origin. They are hospitable to each other but, collectively, they terrorize the helots using, it may be, mercenaries from elsewhere.
He is thereby saved from the embarrassment of either too large a company or too large a family. A tenant at will, who possesses land sufficient to maintain his family for little more than a quit-rent, is as dependent upon the proprietor as any servant or retainer whatever and must obey him with as little reserve.
He may join with his peers to rebel against the feudal lord.
Such a proprietor, as he feeds his servants and retainers at his own house, so he feeds his tenants at their houses. The subsistence of both is derived from his bounty, and its continuance depends upon his good pleasure.
It depends on whether some more commercial and ruthless people can turn that land to a more productive use- e.g. replace crofters with sheep because wool commands a high price across the sea.
Upon the authority which the great proprietor necessarily had in such a state of things over their tenants and retainers was founded the power of the ancient barons.
It was founded on military prowess though, no doubt, gifts and marriage alliances and clerical support could shore up one's position. But for how long? Either there was an invasion or a jacquerie or, sooner or later, you fall victim to intrigue or vendetta or can no longer borrow money and pay your troops. The old aristocracy has to become mercantile or else seek safe harbour in the Church or the liberal professions.
They necessarily became the judges in peace, and the leaders in war, of all who dwelt upon their estates.
They gave sanctuary to outlaws in the hope that those outlaws would not cut their throats
They could maintain order and execute the law within their respective demesnes, because each of them could there turn the whole force of all the inhabitants against the injustice of any one.
No. They had to tread carefully. The Chieftain remains the Chieftain because his nominal vassals have more to fear from each other than from him.
No other persons had sufficient authority to do this. The king in particular had not.
In England, Norman Kings could conduct a 'General Eyre'. Perhaps Scotland was too poor to permit any such thing.
In those ancient times he was little more than the greatest proprietor in his dominions, to whom, for the sake of common defence against their common enemies, the other great proprietors paid certain respects. To have enforced payment of a small debt within the lands of a great proprietor, where all the inhabitants were armed and accustomed to stand by one another, would have cost the king, had he attempted it by his own authority, almost the same effort as to extinguish a civil war. He was, therefore, obliged to abandon the administration of justice through the greater part of the country to those who were capable of administering it; and for the same reason to leave the command of the country militia to those whom that militia would obey.
Where such was the case, the King was a Roi faineant or mere figure head. Justice is a service industry. Kings provide Justice to make a bit of money. Smith, lazy sod that he was, had forgotten this.
It is a mistake to imagine that those territorial jurisdictions took their origin from the feudal law. Not only the highest jurisdictions both civil and criminal, but the power of levying troops, of coining money, and even that of making bye-laws for the government of their own people, were all rights possessed allodially by the great proprietors of land several centuries before even the name of the feudal law was known in Europe
Land title is allodial in Scotland but not England or the US. So what? Who the fuck cares?
The authority and jurisdiction of the Saxon lords in England appear to have been as great before the Conquest as that of any of the Norman lords after it. But the feudal law is not supposed to have become the common law of England till after the Conquest. That the most extensive authority and jurisdictions were possessed by the great lords in France allodially long before the feudal law was introduced into that country is a matter of fact that admits of no doubt.
What admits no doubt was that the strong could dispossess and enslave the weak.
That authority and those jurisdictions all necessarily flowed from the state of property and manners just now described. Without remounting to the remote antiquities of either the French or English monarchies, we may find in much later times many proofs that such effects must always flow from such causes. It is not thirty years ago since Mr. Cameron of Lochiel,
the nineteenth hereditary chieftain (Lochiel) of Clan Cameron. Smith is pretending the guy was a local solicitor who played a prominent part in the Rotary Society.
a gentleman of Lochabar in Scotland, without any legal warrant whatever, not being what was then called a lord of regality, nor even a tenant in chief, but a vassal of the Duke of Argyle
head of the Clan Campbell. Smith pretends that the Argyles had made their money in merchant banking and advanced in the peerage thanks to their diligence as Chancellors of the Exchequer or Governors General of the Canada.
, and without being so much as a justice of peace, used, notwithstanding, to exercise the highest criminal jurisdiction over his own people. He is said to have done so with great equity, though without any of the formalities of justice; and it is not improbable that the state of that part of the country at that time made it necessary for him to assume this authority in order to maintain the public peace.
to wage war against the King.
That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with him.
Because the was their Chieftain.
The introduction of the feudal law, so far from extending, may be regarded as an attempt to moderate the authority of the great allodial lords.
Scotland, since about 2004, has only allodial land ownership. I believe the last feudal dues were done away with in the Seventies. It is notable that ever since Scotland was released from the 'moderating' effects of feudalism, great allodial lords have been beating and sodomizing tenants, and also any sheep belonging to those tenants, in a merciless manner. That is why so many billions of Scottish people have taken refuge south of the border.
It established a regular subordination, accompanied with a long train of services and duties, from the king down to the smallest proprietor. During the minority of the proprietor, the rent, together with the management of his lands, fell into the hands of his immediate superior, and, consequently, those of all great proprietors into the hands of the king, who was charged with the maintenance and education of the pupil, and who, from his authority as guardian, was supposed to have a right of disposing of him in marriage, provided it was in a manner not unsuitable to his rank.
Very true. Queenji used to see to the education of Scottish peeps. Then Tony fucking Blair abolished feudalism and Scottish peeps started killing and raping everything in sight.
But though this institution necessarily tended to strengthen the authority of the king, and to weaken that of the great proprietors, it could not do either sufficiently for establishing order and good government among the inhabitants of the country, because it could not alter sufficiently that state of property and manners from which the disorders arose. The authority of government still continued to be, as before, too weak in the head and too strong in the inferior members, and the excessive strength of the inferior members was the cause of the weakness of the head.
No. Feudalism was about being too fucking poor to have a standing army.
After the institution of feudal subordination, the king was as incapable of restraining the violence of the great lords as before. They still continued to make war according to their own discretion, almost continually upon one another, and very frequently upon the king; and the open country still continued to be a scene of violence, rapine, and disorder.
Like present day Scotland where land ownership is allodial.
But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about.
The country can tax imports and thus gain 'fiscal headroom' sufficient to pay for a standing army and nationwide independent justice system.
These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers.
This was true of anybody and everybody with a surplus. Potlatches are rational if you have no way to store surplus food and drink. You may as well throw a big party.
All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Whereas poor people were notorious for wanting to share their last crust with people poorer yet. I once heard of a bloke who would not let his friends fuck his wife. He wanted her all to himself. What a vile fellow he must have been!
As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas in the more ancient method of expense they must have shared with at least a thousand people. With the judges that were to determine the preference this difference was perfectly decisive; and thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest, and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority.
Why is Scotland not the scenes of Civil Wars and tribal vendettas? How come Campbells don't claim hospitality from MacDonalds before slaughtering their hosts? The answer is that Scottish people have become very evil. They may not buy 'diamond buckles', but they do buy clothes and food and nice houses. Fuck you Scottish peeps! Fuck you very much!
In a country where there is no foreign commerce, nor any of the finer manufactures, a man of ten thousand a year
ten thousand what? Sheep?
cannot well employ his revenue in any other way than in maintaining, perhaps, a thousand families, who are all of them necessarily at his command.
They are at his command so long as he is feeding them roast lamb
In the present state of Europe, a man of ten thousand a year can spend his whole revenue, and he generally does so, without directly maintaining twenty people, or being able to command more than ten footmen not worth the commanding.
Which is why wealthy Europeans weren't constantly conducting cattle raids on their neighbours.
Indirectly, perhaps, he maintains as great or even a greater number of people than he could have done by the ancient method of expense.
Perhaps Smith thought Mad King George 'maintained' tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors and civil servants. Also, plantation owners were maintaining hundreds or thousands of African slaves out of a pure spirit of Christian Charity and gentlemanly hospitality.
For though the quantity of precious productions for which he exchanges his whole revenue be very small, the number of workmen employed in collecting and preparing it must necessarily have been very great.
Or not. Smith had shit for brains. He believed in the Labour theory of value. He did not understand that coal is abundant. Diamonds are scarce. Very little labour may be involved in finding a diamond. But its price is high.
When the great proprietors of land spend their rents in maintaining their tenants and retainers, each of them maintains entirely all his own tenants and all his own retainers.
Because those tenants and retainers don't do any work. Sheep shear themselves and willingly slit their own throats and barbeque themselves. Bread bakes itself. Cottages thatch themselves.
But when they spend them in maintaining tradesmen and artificers, they may, all of them taken together, perhaps, maintain as great, or, on account of the waste which attends rustic hospitality, a greater number of people than before. Each of them, however, taken singly, contributes often but a very small share to the maintenance of any individual of this greater number. Each tradesman or artificer derives his subsistence from the employment, not of one, but of a hundred or a thousand different customers. Though in some measure obliged to them all, therefore, he is not absolutely dependent upon any one of them.
He is dependent on the State which provides national defence and a justice system. That's why he pays taxes.
The personal expense of the great proprietors having in this manner gradually increased, it was impossible that the number of their retainers should not as gradually diminish till they were at last dismissed altogether. The same cause gradually led them to dismiss the unnecessary part of their tenants. Farms were enlarged, and the occupiers of land, notwithstanding the complaints of depopulation, reduced to the number necessary for cultivating it, according to the imperfect state of cultivation and improvement in those times. By the removal of the unnecessary mouths, and by exacting from the farmer the full value of the farm, a greater surplus, or what is the same thing, the price of a greater surplus, was obtained for the proprietor, which the merchants and manufacturers soon furnished him with a method of spending upon his own person in the same manner as he had done the rest. The same cause continuing to operate, he was desirous to raise his rents above what his lands, in the actual state of their improvement, could afford. His tenants could agree to this upon one condition only, that they should be secured in their possession for such a term of years as might give them time to recover with profit whatever they should lay out in the further improvement of the land. The expensive vanity of the landlord made him willing to accept of this condition; and hence the origin of long leases.
Why take a long lease when invaders or insurrectionists might usurp sovereignty? What drove productivity was the fact that more productive people, by hook or by crook, would gain land and other factors of production from the less productive. It was a Darwinian struggle for survival, not vanity or hedonism which caused the relations of production to change.
Even a tenant at will, who pays the full value of the land, is not altogether dependent upon the landlord. The pecuniary advantages which they receive from one another are mutual and equal, and such a tenant will expose neither his life nor his fortune in the service of the proprietor. But if he has a lease for a long term of years, he is altogether independent; and his landlord must not expect from him the most trifling service beyond what is either expressly stipulated in the lease or imposed upon him by the common and known law of the country.
No. The Crown may demand much from the people for national defence. It is better to be impoverished by high taxes than to be enslaved.
The tenants having in this manner become independent, and the retainers being dismissed, the great proprietors were no longer capable of interrupting the regular execution of justice or of disturbing the peace of the country. Having sold their birthright, not like Esau for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the playthings of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesman in a city.
No. Some Scottish lairds rose in politics and statecraft to positions of international prominence. But some descendants of merchants or lawyers rose yet higher in the nobility and held great offices of state.
It does not, perhaps, relate to the present subject, but I cannot help remarking it, that very old families, such as have possessed some considerable estate from father to son for many successive generations are very rare in commercial countries. In countries which have little commerce, on the contrary, such as Wales or the highlands of Scotland, they are very common.
But those who rose by commerce tended to marry into the older aristocracy. Moreover, where there was an absolute monarch, the old aristocracy tended to be degraded from generation to generation unless it served the state. But then many tiles of nobility were originally designations of political office.
The Arabian histories seem to be all full of genealogies, and there is a history written by a Tartar Khan, which has been translated into several European languages, and which contains scarce anything else; a proof that ancient families are very common among those nations.
Genghis Khan got his start hunting marmosets. It is easy to create an ancient pedigree for a warrior who rose to the Crown by reason of his martial prowess.
In countries where a rich man can spend his revenue in no other way than by maintaining as many people as it can maintain, he is not apt to run out, and his benevolence it seems is seldom so violent as to attempt to maintain more than he can afford.
Yet plenty such were bankrupted by their generosity. It turned out that the Church was a better husbandman of real estate but if it did not have the military power to defend its assets, it might lose everything.
But where he can spend the greatest revenue upon his own person, he frequently has no bounds to his expense, because he frequently has no bounds to his vanity or to his affection for his own person.
This was also the case of Kings who were too lavish in their gifts to the Church or to artists or courtesans.
In commercial countries, therefore, riches, in spite of the most violent regulations of law to prevent their dissipation, very seldom remain long in the same family.
Because families die out- at least in the paternal line.
Among simple nations, on the contrary, they frequently do without any regulations of law, for among nations of shepherds, such as the Tartars and Arabs, the consumable nature of their property necessarily renders all such regulations impossible.
In such nations, almost everybody may be very poor.
A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.
This is foolish. Kings saw that by encouraging 'high value adding' crafts, their revenue could rise. Merchants saw the benefit of gaining 'royal warrants'. Foreigners are more likely to buy luxury goods endorsed by the leaders of the country producing those goods. We will pay more for the brand of cigar smoked by Fidel Castro just as we will pay more for the marmalade produced by the Company which has a Royal warrant from King Charles.
It is thus that through the greater part of Europe the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.
In Holland, it appears the reverse was the case. In England too, the need to raise productivity following the Black Death seems to have spurred urban development and the rise in manufacturing.
Scotland was somewhat behind England. Even Hume and Smith, despite their great intellectual gifts and superb prose style, required aristocratic patrons. In England, Alexander Pope achieved opulence by supplying the market with a superior product.
This order, however, being contrary to the natural course of things, is necessarily both slow and uncertain. Compare the slow progress of those European countries of which the wealth depends very much upon their commerce and manufactures with the rapid advances of our North American colonies, of which the wealth is founded altogether in agriculture.
We know Smith was wrong. The agricultural South was defeated by the industrial North.
Through the greater part of Europe the number of inhabitants is not supposed to double in less than five hundred years. In several of our North American colonies, it is found to double in twenty or five-and-twenty years.
The indigenous population declined sharply.
In Europe, the law of primogeniture and perpetuities of different kinds prevent the division of great estates, and thereby hinder the multiplication of small proprietors. A small proprietor, however, who knows every part of his little territory, who views it with all the affection which property, especially small property, naturally inspires, and who upon that account takes pleasure not only in cultivating but in adorning it, is generally of all improvers the most industrious, the most intelligent, and the most successful.
Till he realises he can make more money and work fewer hours by moving to the City. The big problem with being a small-holder is that your pigs sneer at you because you smell so bad.
The same regulations, besides, keep so much land out of the market that there are always more capitals to buy than there is land to sell, so that what is sold always sells at a monopoly price.
Smith didn't know Economics. That's why he is considered the father of the subject. There is a disincentive to sell land precisely because it is relatively easy to borrow on its security.
The rent never pays the interest of the purchase-money, and is, besides, burdened with repairs and other occasional charges to which the interest of money is not liable. To purchase land is everywhere in Europe a most unprofitable employment of a small capital.
I suppose this was true enough at that time. However the purchase of land was linked to greater political power and social influence.
For the sake of the superior security, indeed, a man of moderate circumstances, when he retires from business, will sometimes choose to lay out his little capital in land. A man of profession too, whose revenue is derived from. another source, often loves to secure his savings in the same way. But a young man, who, instead of applying to trade or to some profession, should employ a capital of two or three thousand pounds in the purchase and cultivation of a small piece of land, might indeed expect to live very happily, and very independently, but must bid adieu forever to all hope of either great fortune or great illustration, which by a different employment of his stock he might have had the same chance of acquiring with other people. Such a person too, though he cannot aspire at being a proprietor, will often disdain to be a farmer. The small quantity of land, therefore, which is brought to market, and the high price of what is brought thither, prevents a great number of capitals from being employed in its cultivation and improvement which would otherwise have taken that direction. In North America, on the contrary, fifty or sixty pounds is often found a sufficient stock to begin a plantation with. The purchase and improvement of uncultivated land is there the most profitable employment of the smallest as well as of the greatest capitals, and the most direct road to all the fortune and illustration which can be acquired in that country. Such land, indeed, is in North America to be had almost for nothing, or at a price much below the value of the natural produce- a thing impossible in Europe, or, indeed, in any country where all lands have long been private property.
Land was scarce in Europe. It wasn't for Europeans who went to America and killed off the native population.
If landed estates, however, were divided equally among all the children upon the death of any proprietor who left a numerous family, the estate would generally be sold.
That was what was happening to land owned by Catholics in Ireland. The consequence was the potato famine.
So much land would come to market that it could no longer sell at a monopoly price. The free rent of the land would go nearer to pay the interest of the purchase-money, and a small capital might be employed in purchasing land as profitably as in any other way.
Land prices, in real terms, did fall from the 1880s onward.
England, on account of the natural fertility of the soil, of the great extent of the sea-coast in proportion to that of the whole country, and of the many navigable rivers which run through it and afford the conveniency of water carriage to some of the most inland parts of it, is perhaps as well fitted by nature as any large country in Europe to be the seat of foreign commerce, of manufactures for distant sale, and of all the improvements which these can occasion.
Scotland would rise up thanks to the thrift, enterprise and innovative power of its inhabitants.
From the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth too, the English legislature has been peculiarly attentive to the interests of commerce and manufactures, and in reality there is no country in Europe, Holland itself not excepted, of which the law is, upon the whole, more favourable to this sort of industry. Commerce and manufactures have accordingly been continually advancing during all this period. The cultivation and improvement of the country has, no doubt, been gradually advancing too; but it seems to have followed slowly, and at a distance, the more rapid progress of commerce and manufactures. The greater part of the country must probably have been cultivated before the reign of Elizabeth; and a very great part of it still remains uncultivated, and the cultivation of the far greater part much inferior to what it might be. The law of England, however, favours agriculture not only indirectly by the protection of commerce, but by several direct encouragements. Except in times of scarcity, the exportation of corn is not only free, but encouraged by a bounty. In times of moderate plenty, the importation of foreign corn is loaded with duties that amount to a prohibition. The importation of live cattle, except from Ireland, is prohibited at all times, and it is but of late that it was permitted from thence. Those who cultivate the land, therefore, have a monopoly against their countrymen for the two greatest and most important articles of land produce, bread and butcher's meat.
Indeed. Also, politically speaking, the shires were better represented than the emerging manufacturing towns. Indeed, some rotten boroughs had become thoroughly depopulated. Scottish highlands and islands would become depopulated at a later period. The 'landed interest' would decline in political power over the course of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the Squire and the Vicar would retain social prominence even into the Twentieth Century. Smith can't be blamed too much for failing to predict the future. What he can be blamed for is his obdurate clinging to the labour theory of value and his absurd suggestion that the nobility of old had been content to dress in rags while keeping open house for all the people of their territory. Sadly, the Scots got rid of feudalism some twenty years ago and so all land ownership there is now allodial. The result has been that Scottish people have reverted to cannibalism. Amartya Sen should have pointed this out to his friends north of the border.
