Common Sense with Paul Jacob

We can scarcely conceive at first that the great effects . . . have no other cause than the sole reciprocity of services and the multiplicity of exchanges. However this continual succession of exchanges has three very remarkable advantages.

First, the labour of several men united is more productive, than that of the same men acting separately. . . .

Secondly, our knowledge is our most precious acquisition, since it is this that directs the employment of our force, and renders it more fruitful, in proportion to its greater soundness and extent. . . .

Thirdly, and this still merits attention: when several men labour reciprocally for one another every one can devote himself exclusively to the occupation for which is fittest, whether from his natural dispositions or from fortuitous circumstances; and thus he will succeed better. . . .

Concurrence of force, increase and preservation of knowledge, and division of labour, — these are the three great benefits of society. They cause themselves to be felt from the first by men the most rude; but they augment in an incalculable ratio, in proportion as they are perfected, — and every degree of amelioration, in the social order, adds still to the possibility of increasing and better using them.”

Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Mulligan, publisher; W. A. Rind & Co., printer, 1817) Thomas Jefferson, ed. of translation, from the section entitled “The First Part of the Treatise on the Will and Its Effects: Of Our Action,” chapter one, “Of Society.”

Sola la miseria è senza invidia nelle cose presenti.

In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy.

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (c. 1350), “Fourth Day,” Introduction (tr. G. H. McWilliam).

The Republic of Finland officially confirmed its form of government on July 17, 1919. For this reason, the Seventeenth of July is known as the Day of Democracy in Finland.

It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of this world are managed. Naturally one would imagine, that the interest of a few individuals should give way to general interest; but individuals manage their affairs with so much more application, industry, and address, than the public do theirs, that general interest most commonly gives way to particular. We assemble parliaments and councils, to have the benefit of their collected wisdom; but we necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices, and private interests. By the help of these, artful men overpower their wisdom, and dupe its possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, arrets, and edicts, all the world over, for regulating commerce, an assembly of great men is the greatest fool upon earth.

Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, July 26, 1784. The word “arrets,” in the final sentence, is Franklin’s anglicization of “arrêts,” the French legal term for judicial decrees or formal rulings (typically issued by sovereign courts in pre-revolutionary France).