… is from page 104 of the 2011 Liberty Fund edition of Thomas Jefferson’s 1817 translation, from the French, of Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy’s 1817 A Treatise on Political Economy (original emphasis):
This is what we should understand by to produce: It is to give things an utility which they had not. Whatever be our labour, if no utility results from it it is unfruitful. If any results it is productive.
DBx: Let us free ourselves of the mysticism that insists that only the production of physical or tangible things is productive.
