Note 718 — Chapter I · : THE OPTIMISTS
R. (Robert) Richards translation
Bastiat does not seem to have studied rent. The chapter of the Harmonies on this subject was never completed. Fontenay, one of his disciples, wrote a brilliant book called Du Revenu foncier (1854), which is almost forgotten to-day. He attempted to show:
(1) That Ricardian or differential rent would not exist were all the land equally fertile and suitably cultivated.
(2) That it is incorrect to speak of the rent of natural fertility, as Adam Smith and the Physiocrats did, if all utility (and not merely value) is the product of human labour. A fish, a grape, a grain of wheat, a fat ox, all of them have been created by human industry. Nature is for ever incapable of doing this. This is quite true if we say nature alone, but it is equally true of labour taken by itself.