n time, but with an allowance
for skill and technical competency. By describing this allowance as a
coefficient we can give our statement a false air of mathematical
certainty and so muddle up the essential question that the truth is lost
from sight like a pea under a thimble. Now you see it and now you don't.
The thing is, in fact, a mere piece of intellectual conjuring. The
conjurer has slipped the phrase, "quantity of labor," up his sleeve, and
when it reappears it has turned into "the expense of hiring labor." This
is a quite different thing. But as both conceptions are related somehow
to the idea of cost, the substitution is never discovered.

On this false basis a vast structure is erected. All prices, provided
that competition is free, are made to appear as the necessary result of
natural forces. They are "natural" or "normal" prices. All wages are
explained, and low wages are exonerated, on what seems to be an
undeniable ground of fact. They are what they are. You may wish them
otherwise, but they are not. As a philanthropist, you may feel sorry
that a humble laborer should work through a long day to receive two
dollars, but as an economist you console yourself with the reflection
that that is all he produces. You may at times, as a sentimentalist,
wonder whether the vast sums drawn as interest on capital are consistent
with social fairness; but if it is shown that interest is simply the
"natural price" of capital representing the actual "productive power" of
the capital, there is nothing further to say. You may have similar
qualms over rent and the rightness and wrongness of it. The enormous
"unearned increment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of land who
toils not neither spins to obtain it, may seem difficult of
justification. But after all, land is only one particular case of
ownership under the one and the same system. The rent for which the
owner can lease it, emerges simply as a consequence of the existing
state of wages and prices. High rent, says the economist, does not make
big prices: it merely follows as a consequence or result of them. Dear
bread is not caused by the high rents paid by tenant farmers for the
land: the train of cause and effect runs in the contrary direction. And
the selling price of land is merely a consequence of its rental value, a
simple case of capitalization of annual return into a present sum. City
land, though it looks different from farm land, is seen in the light of
th