LYCOS RETRIEVER 
David Ricardo: Corn Laws
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Ricardo formulated the laws governing movements of goods, and countermovements of money from one place to another. Trade, he said, is essentially the same as barter, since money seldom leaves a country. These ideas were further developed by John Stuart Mill in his theory of international values. Ricardo's theory of comparative cost was fundamental to later thought onthe international localization of production.
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In 1814, at the age of 42, Ricardo retired from business and took up residence at Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire, where he had extensive landholdings. In 1819 he became MP for Portarlington. He did not speak often but his free-trade views were received with respect, although they opposed the economic thinking of the day. Parliament was made up of landowners who wished to maintain the Corn Laws to protect their profits.
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In 1819, Ricardo took a seat in the House of Commons as the MP for Portarlington, an Irish borough. He held the seat until his death in 1823. In 1846 his nephew, John Lewis Ricardo, MP for Stoke-on-Trent, advocated free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws.
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Egged on by his good friend James Mill, Ricardo got himself elected into the British parliament in 1819 as an independent representing a borough in Ireland, which he served up to his death in 1823. In parliament, he was primarily interested in the currency and commercial questions of the day, such as the repayment of public debt, capital taxation and the repeal of the Corn Laws. (cf. Thomas Moore's poems on Cash, Corn and Catholics)
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[S]econd, on the matter of Free Trade, Ricardo sharply criticized England's high tariffs on agricultural goods. This led to a repeal of the 'Corn Laws,' and ultimately led to much freer trade in the world. In another part of his 'Corn Laws' critique he ... defined the 'Law of Diminishing Returns,' an economic concept that stands to this day.
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Ricardo thought the distress was of a temporary nature, because according to him the cause of the fall in corn prices was excess of production. (Abundance of corn was not a curse to the country, but certainly to the producer of corn: “If we lived in one of Mr. Owen’s parallelograms, and enjoyed all our productions in common, then no one could suffer in consequence of abundance, but as long as society is constituted as it now is, abundance will often be injurious to producers, and scarcity beneficial to them”: IV, 222). However, he did not miss this opportunity to attack the Corn Laws. They allowed corn to be grown at a much higher price in Britain than abroad, and this deprived the corn grower of one of the chief remedies to excessive production, namely exportation. Also, he blamed the absurd mechanism according to which no importation of corn was allowed until a certain (very high: 80 shillings per quarter) price was reached, but when it was reached, the ports were thrown open for three months, no matter what happened in this period to corn prices. To remedy these evils, Ricardo proposed a scheme which ought by steps to have replaced this mechanism with one of freedom of importation, coupled with a duty on importation to “countervail the peculiar burthens to which the grower of corn is subject” in Britain (he generously fixed it at 10 shillings per quarter), and a parallel drawback on exportation (7 shillings per quarter).
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