Having taken orders and held a curacy he was appointed reader at St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, and was afterwards presented to the vicarage of Wickham Skeith in Suffolk.
As long as prices steadily rose he argued that though more money might be taken out of the taxpayer's pocket, the quantity of commodities which the sum levied by taxation would purchase steadily decreased, and that thus if 'burden' were interpreted to be the amount of commodities of the power of purchasing which the community was deprived by taxation, its increase need not be and had not been at all proportionate to the increase of charge.
In this way he proved to his own satisfaction that the burden of the amount paid to the creditors of the notion at the Peace of Utrecht was nearly the same as when he wrote, and that the alarm of Dr. Price and others at the increase of the national debt was wholly baseless.
[1] Of such other of Brand's pamphlets on economic subjects as are in the library of the British Museum, the most interesting is his Determination of the average price of wheat in war below that of the preceding peace, and of its readvance in the following.
Here he sought to prove on theoretical grounds that war lowers while peace raises the price of wheat, and he then proceeded to endeavour to confirm the soundness of this position by an appeal to statistics.
Brand's name is, however, supplied together with what appears to be a complete list of his separate publications (the library of the British Museum is without several of them), in the memoir of him in John Nichols's Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, vi.