> ‘Our forests and great commons make the poor that are upon them too much like the Indians,’ wrote the Quaker John Bellers in 1695; ‘[they are] a hindrance to industry, and are nurseries of idleness and insolence’. In 1771 the agriculturalist Arthur Young noted that ‘everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious’. The Reverend Joseph Townsend emphasised in 1786 that ‘it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour’. ‘Legal constraint,’ Townsend went on, ‘is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise … whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions … Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.’ > > Patrick Colquhoun, a powerful Scottish merchant, saw poverty as an essential precondition for industrialisation: > >> "Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth." > > David Hume (1752) built on these sentiments to elaborate an explicit theory of ‘scarcity’: ‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.’ These passages reveal a remarkable paradox. The proponents of capitalism themselves believed it was necessary to impoverish people in order to generate growth. --- Source: Hickel, Jason. Less is More (pp. 57-58). Random House. Kindle Edition.