ABSTRACT
David Ricardo shows the shortcomings in Adam Smith's vision of 'the commercial society' as an overarching solution for the questions of distribution and production. Ricardo's ideas concerning distribution first made their appearance in his correspondence with Thomas Malthus. Ricardo also refers to Malthus, who had likened agriculture with its different qualities of land to a machine park. In order for food production to be secured, it is necessary, paradoxically enough, to liberalize the trade in agricultural products and, beyond this, to encourage all improvements in agricultural productivity. The striving to rescue business profits would lead to improvements and rationalizations, and it is at this point that Ricardo makes his most interesting observations from the point of view of business economics. According to Ricardo, economic development has culminated in a negative process because of the entrepreneurs' attempt to rescue net production, while the preservation or expansion of gross production lay neither in their interest nor in that of the nation.
