Rivers of Imprisonment: An Introduction to Political Economy

Heavily referenced to Adam Smith's work, among other great thinkers (such as Edward Gibbon), my work refers to John Maynard Keynes' ideas as diatribe: he resurrected the idea of "balance of trade", i.e. the misguided hypnotism that the amount of money entering a country minus the amount leaving, is somehow profit to that nation. Adam Smith debunked this myth. I follow in Smith's footsteps and put forth the idea that the concept of a balance of trade is both misguided and is socially and environmentally dangerous.

It is the policies of law that regulates trade among the world in which we live which currently cause both poverty and makes humans the most invasive species on this planet. I stand for the belief that land management and ideas surrounding the entire concepts of land and taxation need amending as they are currently flawed on a global level.

This book is written in an older regional dialect of the English language, in which many of the prepositional structures of the language are not those of modern English today. For example, the sentence as "I ran out of fear", in the 17th century, implies that although fear was originally present in the location I was running away from, I am no longer at the location where fear is present anymore (it is an abbreviation of the sentence as "I ran outside of fear"); whereas, in the 17th century, the sentence as "I ran from fear" implies that although I was running in a direction opposite that than which would be towards fear, I might not necessarily have escaped that location where fear is. It does not imply that fear was present in my running: to say that, we would use the sentence as "I ran because of fear". This is consistent with the sentence as "He came out of India", in modern English, implying that he is not any longer within India. The words as "out of" have a chaotic meaning because these words, I say, should not mean the same as "because of"; nor should mean the same as the word as "from": because, if I came out of India, I am not any longer there. If I ran from fear then this, I say, should mean I am running away from fear, and should not mean that I ran because of fear. The footnotes contain many explanations of the forms of the prepositional words I have used. Although I might emend and update this potentially rare first edition if my understanding and experience evolves further, my aim was to use English in a way which makes this work transliterable into many other languages around the world. The work contains many involved economic arguments, again many of which are referenced from Adam Smith. I hope you may enjoy it!