There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down.
-- David Ricardo, On Protection to Agriculture (1820)
This essay seeks to go one step further in the context of David Ricardo's quote by arguing that totalitarian political systems offer a way of keeping profits up by keeping wages down and inversely, in a democratic system wages will have a tendency to rise and thus, profits will decline.
When looking at David Ricardo's quote within the context of both totalitarian and democratic political systems, two assumptions have been made. …
