?"

"The price is the labor it has cost to make and deliver it, and it is
determined by the first principles of arithmetic. The million workers in
the nation's wheat fields have worked a hundred days each, and the total
product of the labor is a billion bushels, so the value of a bushel of
wheat is the tenth part of a farm labor-day. If we employ an arbitrary
symbol, and pay, say, five dollars a day for farm work, then the cost of
a bushel of wheat is fifty cents."

"You say 'for farm work,'" said Mr. Maynard. "Then labor is not to be
paid alike?"

"Manifestly not, since some work is easy and some hard, and we should
have millions of rural mail carriers, and no coal miners. Of course the
wages may be left the same, and the hours varied; one or the other will
have to be varied continually, according as a greater or less number of
workers is needed in any particular industry. That is precisely what is
done at present, except that the transfer of the workers is accomplished
blindly and imperfectly, by rumors and advertisements, instead of
instantly and completely, by a universal government bulletin."

"How about those occupations in which time is difficult to calculate?
What is the labor cost of a book?"

"Obviously it is the labor cost of the paper, printing, and binding of
it--about a fifth of its present cost."

"And the author?"

"I have already said that the state could not control intellectual
production. The state might say that it had taken a year to write the
book, and the author might say it had taken thirty. Goethe said that
every bon mot of his had cost a purse of gold. What I outline here is
a national, or rather international, system for the providing of the
material needs of men. Since a man has intellectual needs also, he will
work longer, earn more, and provide for them to his own taste and in his
own way. I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear the same kind
of shoes and sleep in the same kind of bed; but I do not think the same
kind of thoughts, and I do not wish to pay for such thinkers as the
majority selects. I wish such things to be left to free effort, as
at present. If people want to listen to a certain preacher, they get
together and contribute what they please, and pay for a church and
support the preacher, and then listen to him; I, who do not want to
listen to him, stay away, and it costs me nothing. In the same way there
are magazines about Egyptian coins, and Catholic saints,