Economics for Irishmen - 1906 Author:Pat Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE AGENTS OF PRODUCTION—LAND. WERE the task merely to outline a system of Economics, less might be said of land than of either of the two more i... more »mportant agents of production ; but the greater need is to hunt down an agrarian fallacy, which, in this peculiar country, requires more writing about the land than about labour and capital together. This alone indicates how the nation's productive powers, and therefore its life, are disorganised and degraded. The people can live only by production, and production depends on its agents working together, each of the three being an essential; therefore, to lose sight of labour and capital, while confining attention to land alone, must hinder and destroy the nation's means to live. The individual knows quite well how he must always go on producing, to enable him to buy the products of others and to live, and from this we can see how he lives well or ill according to his productivity ; but this is equally true of the nation, which must starve and decay in proportion as the agents of production are misdirected in themselves or dissociated from the productive process. I must drive home this fundamental truth, even if I have to repeat myself often. The fallacy I have to expose is to my own mind so plain that I wonder how the national mind comes to be completely dominated by it. Were the Irish naturally a stupid people, it would be more easily accounted for, but a people of manymental gifts, dominated and destroyed by their own wilful adhesion to an obvious fallacy is a matter which one cannot pass lightly. I have examined this fallacy from every point of view, and on every applicable economic standard known to me, but no matter on what course I have set out, I have always arrived at the same result—that it is a fallacy, presen...« less