Unlike genuine commodities, labour can be neither accumulated nor even be saved. The producer is acquainted with neither the needs nor the resources, neither the demand nor the supply. He sells when he wants, then he can, where he wants, to whom he wants and at the price he wants. The same goes for buying. While at one point there is a shortage of wealth, at another there is a surfeit and squandering of the same.
Supply is ignorant of demand, and demand is ignorant of supply.
Human life is a piece of capital. Economic laws rule the world blindly. For Ricardo, men are nothing, the product everything. The wool of the southern counties of Scotland is, a great part of it, after a long land carriage through very bad roads, manufactured in Yorkshire, for want of capital to manufacture it at home. There are many little manufacturing towns in Great Britain, of which the inhabitants have not capital sufficient to transport the produce of their own industry to those distant markets where there is demand and consumption for it.