Adam Smith always elicited more affection than his successors, and with good reason.
In addition to his comforting confidence in the moral sentiments, he predicted that commerce would increase the wealth of nations, not merely of certain groups within them. Malthus and Ricardo were far less optimistic.
Both believed that wages would never exceed subsistence in the long run, because population growth would only bring them down again. Ricardo warned that rents would likely rise and bring a halt to economic growth.Small wonder, then, that the very phrase ‘‘the wealth of nations” began to elicit groans. It was ridiculed not merely by the great Romantic poets of early nineteenth century Britain but also by a popular novelist whose sensibilities had been shaped by his own childhood experience in the workhouse— Charles Dickens. Religious warnings that greedy merchants would land in hell were reborn as cultural critique—misers like Ebeneezer Scrooge would be condemned to nightmares.
Malthus and Ricardo were undeterred, or perhaps uninterested in this old debate. They shifted their attention from self-interest to collective interest, dividing Hobbes's Leviathan into three parts: landlords, capitalists of the new industrial order, and workers, defined as those who owned nothing but their own capacity to work. Men were assigned to classes by the great lottery of birth, mushrooms sorted into baskets by a divine hand. Malthus (a clergyman) was inclined to favor landlords, Ricardo (though in later life a landlord), capitalists. Their contending theories of rent and profit shaped debate over the abolition of tariffs on imported food, the Corn Laws that protected British agriculture from competition. They also informed the larger and even more contentious struggle over the meaning of free trade.