y all do? Then the output could
not be sold at the present price. But why not sell the produce at a
higher price? Because at a higher price the consumer can't afford to buy
it. But suppose that the consumer, for the things which he himself
makes and sells, or for the work which he performs, receives more? What
then? The whole thing begins to have a jigsaw look, like a child's toy
rack with wooden soldiers on it, expanding and contracting. One searches
in vain for the basis on which the relationship rests. And at the end of
the analysis one finds nothing but a mere anarchical play of forces,
nothing but a give-and-take resting on relative bargaining strength.
Every man gets what he can and gives what he has to.

Observe that this is not in the slightest the conclusion of the orthodox
economists. Every man, they said, gets what he actually makes, or, by
exchange, those things which exactly correspond to it as regards the
cost of making them--which have, to use the key-word of the theory, the
same value. Let us take a very simple example. If I go fishing with a
net which I have myself constructed out of fibers and sticks, and if I
catch a fish and if I then roast the fish over a fire which I have made
without so much as the intervention of a lucifer match, then it is I
and I alone who have "produced" the roast fish. That is plain enough.
But what if I catch the fish by using a hired boat and a hired net, or
by buying worms as bait from some one who has dug them? Or what if I do
not fish at all, but get my roast fish by paying for it a part of the
wages I receive for working in a saw mill? Here are a new set of
relationships. How much of the fish is "produced" by each of the people
concerned? And what part of my wages ought I to pay in return for the
part of the fish that I buy?

Here opens up, very evidently, a perfect labyrinth of complexity. But it
was the labyrinth for which the earlier economist held, so he thought,
the thread. No matter how dark the passage, he still clung tight to it.
And his thread was his "fundamental equation of value" whereby each
thing and everything is sold (or tends to be sold) under free
competition for exactly its cost of production. There it was; as simple
as A. B. C.; making the cost of everything proportional to the cost of
everything else, and in itself natural and just; explaining and
justifying the variations of wages and salaries on what seems a stern
basis of fact. Here is your sell