[166] William Petty, A Treatise on Taxes and Constitutions (1662), pages 31-32.
[167] The Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, Chapters V-VI.
[168] Benjamin Franklin, Remarks and Facts Relative to the American Paper Money (1764), page 267.
Marx thus speaks of Franklin as an economist: "The first sensible analysis of exchange-value as labor-time, made so clear as to seem almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New World, where the bourgeois relations of production, imported together with their representatives, sprouted rapidly in a soil which made up its lack of historical traditions with a surplus of humus. That man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of modern political economy in his first work, which he wrote when a mere youth (A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency), and published in 1721." A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, by Karl Marx, English translation by N. I. Stone, 1894, page 62.
[169] David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter I, § III.
[170] Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X.
[171] Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter I, Sec. 1, § 4.
[172] See "The Final Futility of Final Utility," in H. M. Hyndman's Economics of Socialism, for a remarkable criticism of the "final utility" theory, showing its identity with the doctrine of supply and demand as the basis of value.
I refer to the theory of final or marginal utility as the "so-called Austrian theory" for the purpose, mainly, or calling attention to the fact that, as Professor Seligman has ably and clearly demonstrated, it was conceived and excellently stated by W. F. Lloyd, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, in 1833. (See the paper, On Some Neglected British Economists, in the Economic Journal, V, xiii, pages 357-363.) This was two decades before Gossen and a generation earlier than Menger and Jevons. In view of this fact, the criticism of Marx for his lack of originality by members of the "Austrian" school is rather amusing.
[173] Principles of Economics, by Edwin R. A. Seligman (1905), page 198.