 By now it's perhaps hard for us to remember how shocking was the radical capitalist ideology that started to come along around the 1820s. It was given its sharpest doctrinal form in what was called the new science of economics of David Ricardo and Malthus and a senior and others. But the new science rejected the traditional view that people have a right to live. That was taken for granted in traditional societies, feudal societies, slave societies and so on. It was assumed that people have some kind of a place, a right to be in that place, generally a pretty rotten place, but at least some kind of a place. However, the new science challenged that. It proved with the certainty of Newton's laws, as Ricardo put it modestly, it proved that people have no rights apart from what they can gain in the market. You only hurt the poor by trying to help them, so the new science proved. And if people can't survive in the labor market, since they have no other rights, they should go somewhere else, which was not impossible in those days. Recall that free movement of labor is a fundamental principle of free market doctrine. You don't have free movement of labor, you don't have free market. That's one of the many principles that are overlooked, because the theory has been converted into a weapon, an ideological weapon of oppression in the service of the vile maxim and the opulent minority, relying very heavily on state power. For example, subsidies under the guise of security. I should add that even Ricardo, who was the leading exponent of the new science, was unable to free himself completely from traditional human sentiments. So Ricardo recognized that his famous principle of comparative advantage was based on the assumptions that labor is mobile and that capital is immobile. If you drop those assumptions, it doesn't work. That's incidentally the opposite of what prevails today. Labor is immobile and capital is mobile, but we're still supposed to worship at the shrine, even though the assumptions on which the conclusion rests have been reversed. In Ricardo's day, the assumptions were not all that unrealistic. There were vast open spaces which were being cleared of their inhabitants, and that meant a place for impoverished people of Europe and criminals. There was much less need for prisons in those days, because he could send them off to the United States and Australia, and also for poor people. They could move once the land was cleared. But what about capital? Well, capital was largely a matter of land, and land is immobile, so that part of the assumption is correct. But as for the rest, Ricardo remained a captive of pre-capitalist values. He argued that the rich would be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations. And the reason they would do that is just because of human sentiment, community spirit, and so on. Adam Smith had a much clearer view in this regard years earlier when he said, no, they're going to follow the vile maxim. So the point is even Ricardo found it hard to free himself from the taint of human sentiments, despite the teachings of the new science. But it was a dramatic change.