ABSTRACT
Richard Cantillon, author of the Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce, is a bit of a mystery. He was either a Frenchman living in England who wrote in French; or else he was an Englishman living in France who wrote in English, and was translated into French. On the question of money, Cantillon is an enlightened quantity theorist. In place of the crude Friedmanite "helicopter" arguments presented by twentieth-century academics and nineteenth-century philosophers, there is an eighteenth-century businessman’s practical appreciation of the importance of the velocity of circulation. Although Hume's single-gear vision of the economy is more enlightened than that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is still a single-gear vision. Like John Stuart Mill, whenever the theoretical going gets tough, he runs for cover. One of the lingering superstitions, which is originated in the beliefs of the primitive ancients who lived in the twentieth century, is the strange notion that imports are bad and exports are good.
