----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
Michael, 
Very early morning posting can be as perilous as late night posting, and I 
see I expressed myself badly.  Your argument, as I understand it from the 
exchanges, is that the Game Laws, by restricting their intake of food,  
forced independent peasants and small yeomen into the labor 
market; classical political economists were silent about this because 
"capitalism," of which they approved, required these drafts of wage labor. 
My point was intended to be, simply, that a dramatic rise in population 
more than adequately supplied a rapidly expanding labor market from the 
1750s on. One does not have to look to class legislation to account for 
the growth of an urban proletariat when the crude birthrate is over 40 
and the crude deathrate about 25 (as in England and Wales in the 1st 
quarter of the 19th c.).  Marginal protein losses are not likely to play 
much of a role in filling the factories. 
 
For reasons that have already been mentioned--concerns about diminishing  
returns in agriculture, hostility to the aristocracy, etc.--I find it 
difficult to believe the classical political economists surreptitiously approved of the
Game Laws. Far from being delighted by the disappearance of self-sufficent smallholders,
the last generation of classical political economists, J.S. Mill and friends, was quite
keen on re-establishing independent "peasant proprietors."  This was a quixotic project
for a number of reasons, not least because such folk hadn't existed in England in any
numbers for several centuries. Perhaps all of this is crushingly obvious, but it seemed to
be a consideration missing from the discussion.
 
I look forward to reading your book for a full explanation of the thesis. 
 
Jeff Lipkes 
 
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