t brings is a true
expression of its value. If A''' sells for as many dollars as does
B''', the two things exchange for each other. In like manner the
product of labor and that of capital may be expressed in terms of
money, since the quantities of goods which they respectively make sell
for certain sums. Wages and interest are nearly always conceived in
terms of money. The commercial mode of computing costs of production
and returns from production is to translate them into moneys paid by
_entrepreneurs_ and moneys received.

_Costs of Production as related to Static Incomes._--What to an
_entrepreneur_ are costs are to workmen and capitalists incomes. The
one pays out wages and interest, and the others get them; and these
two sums are normal when together they equal the prices received for
goods produced. The _entrepreneur_ is the universal paymaster, and in
a static condition all incomes come from his hand.

CHAPTER VIII

WAGES

_The Equilibrium of Industrial Groups._--The different industrial
groups are in equilibrium when they attract labor and capital equally,
and that occurs when these agents produce as much per unit employed in
one group as in another. Such equalized productivity is the bottom
fact of a static condition, and equalized pay follows from it. Wages
and interest tend to be uniform in all the groups. Efficient labor, of
course, gets in any employment more than inefficient; but labor of a
given grade gets in all the groups that make up industrial society a
uniform rate of pay, and nothing is to be gained by any capitalist or
by any laborer by moving from one employment to another. They all
therefore stay where they are, not because they cannot move freely if
they wish to do so, but because no inducement to move is offered to
them. This is a condition of perfect mobility without motion--of atoms
ready to move at a touch without the touch that would move them. The
paradox indeed holds that it is the ideally perfect mobility which has
existed in the past which positively excludes motion in the present.
At some time in the past labor and capital have gone from group to
group till they have brought about an adjustment in which they have no
incentive for moving farther. The surface of a pool of water is kept
tranquil, not because the water is not perfectly fluid, but because,
in spite of the fact that it can flow with entire freedom in any
direction if it is impelled more in that direction than i