Life
Mun began his career by engaging in Mediterranean trade, and afterwards settled in London, amassing a large fortune. He was a member of the committee of the East India Company and of the standing commission on trade appointed in 1622. Mun’s time as the director of the East India Company coincided with a silver shortage in England, and he was called on to defend the company’s practice of exporting large amounts of silver.
Mun’s 1621 work, A Discourse of Trade from England unto the East Indies, is in a large part a defense of company practices. However, it is for his work England's Treasure by Foreign Trade that he is best remembered. Although written possibly about 1630, it was not given to the public until 1664, when it was “published for the Common good by his son John," and dedicated to Thomas, Earl of Southampton, lord high treasurer.
While Mun is often compared favorably to Josiah Child, another classic mercantilist, England’s Treasure was considered to be a direct repudiation of the arguments of Gerard de Malynes. In it we find for the first time a clear statement of the theory of the balance of trade. According to Mun, trade was the only way to increase England’s treasure and in pursuit of this end he suggested several courses of action: frugal consumption in order to increase the amount of goods available for export, increased utilization of land and other domestic natural resources to reduce import requirements, lowering of export duties on goods produced domestically from foreign materials, and the export of goods with inelastic demand because more money could be made from higher prices.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Mun
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“All my life I’ve felt like somebody’s wife, or somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter. Even all the time we were together, I never knew who I was. And that’s why I had to go away. And in California, I think I found myself.”
—Robert Benton (b. 1932)
“Silent waters rocking on the morning of our birth,
like an empty cradle waiting to be filled.
And from the heart of God the Spirit moved upon the earth,
like a mother breathing life into her child.”
—Gordon Light (20th century)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)