Your pay envelope

by John Richard Meader

This, as you know, is not true.

There are plenty of laborers who have a respectable little store of capital laid by for the proverbial rainy day, and many of them own stock in the very concern that employs them. Not every man who lives by the labor of his hands is existing on the verge of starvation, as Socialists would have you believe, nor is it true that all labor is performed by the “laboring class.” Many so-called “capitalists” are truly sons of toil, the performers of manual labor and the producers of wealth, even as Marx would define a “producer.”

But, let us stop generalizing, and get down to cases.

Marx says that all profit is robbery and exploitation. As an example of the utter absurdity of this theory, let me cite an illustration which Mr. G. W. de Tunzelmann once used in a debate with a prominent English Socialist.

He took the case of a man who buys a diamond for $498,000. The man pays $2,000 to the diamond-cutter for cutting the stone, and, finally, sells it for $550,000, making a 10 per cent. profit upon his outlay. If Marx argues rightly, this sum of $50,000 was obtained by robbery, but—who was robbed? Was it the diamond-cutter who was defrauded of a portion of his wages? Should the entire $52,000 have gone to him for his part in the transaction, while the capitalist got nothing?

The Socialist who was debating with Mr. de Tunzelmann found it impossible to answer this question intelligibly. “If the $50,000 did not come from the diamond-cutter’s wages, where did it come from?” was all he could say, and, John, it is all that any Socialist can say!

Then, here is an illustration from my own experience:

I have a friend who bought a painting from a young artist, paying $300 for it. This was a very fair price to pay for the picture. The artist was well satisfied with his bargain and my friend felt that the work of art was well worth $300 to him. Several years passed, and the comparatively obscure artist became a famous artist—so famous that there were lots of people who wanted to buy his pictures, and my friend found that he could sell his painting and get $2,000 for it.

May we again ask: Who was robbed? The man who painted the picture received its full value at the time; the man who bought the picture from my friend was satisfied that he got good value for his money. If Marx is right, my friend robbed somebody to the extent of $1,700. But whom did he rob?

As we have already seen, the value of an article is chiefly a matter of utility as adfected (raised or lowered) by difficulty of attainment—not the worker’s “difficulty of attainment,” not the time and effort he had to expend to produce this article, but your “difficulty of attainment,” or the effort you must make to secure it. The part that the worker plays in the production of a commodity is of minor importance when compared with the other factors which operate in determining its value. It is the employer, and not the worker, who assumes all the risk. It is the directing genius, and not the mere physical force used in operating the industry, that determines whether it shall succeed or fail. If this were not true, every business enterprise would be a success, for it would be nothing more than the proposition of getting money and men together and setting them to work. But you know that this is not what happens in real life.