athan. If you have the
finest machine in the world and keep it in a garret it will produce
nothing at all. You might as well have a pile of stones there as the
machine.

But connect the machine with the motor and place a competent man in
charge of it, and the machine at once becomes a means of production.
Ability is likewise useless and impotent unless it is expressed in the
form of either manual or mental labor. And when it is so embodied in
labor, it is quite useless and foolish to talk of ability as separate
from the labor in which it is embodied.

_The third principle of Socialist economics is that the value of
things produced for sale is, under normal conditions, determined by
the amount of labor socially necessary, on an average, for their
production. This is called the labor theory of value._

Many people have attacked this theory, Jonathan, and it has been
"refuted," "upset," "smashed" and "destroyed" by nearly every hack
writer on economics living. But, for some reason, the number of people
who accept it is constantly increasing in spite of the number of
times it has been "exposed" and "refuted." It is worth our while to
consider it briefly.

You will observe that I have made two important qualifications in the
above statement of the theory: first, that the law applies only to
things produced for sale, and second, that it is only under normal
conditions that it holds true. Many very clever men try to prove this
law of value wrong by citing the fact that articles are sometimes sold
for enormous prices, out of all proportion to the amount of labor it
took to produce them in the first instance. For example, it took
Shakespeare only a few minutes to write a letter, we may suppose, but
if a genuine letter in the poet's handwriting were offered for sale in
one of the auction rooms where such things are sold it would fetch an
enormous price; perhaps more than the yearly salary of the President
of the United States.

The value of the letter would not be due to the amount of labor
Shakespeare devoted to the writing of it, but to its _rarity_. It
would have what the economists call a "scarcity value." The same is
true of a great many other things, such as historical relics, great
works of art, and so on. These things are in a class by themselves.
But they constitute no important part of the business of modern
society. We are not concerned with them, but with the ordinary, every
day production of goods for sale. Th