Of those categories or Basic Facts there are in number neither more nor less than three—Man, Natural Resources, Artificial Objects.
All Artificial Objects are produced by Man from and upon Natural Resources. The technical term for the activities of Man in that connection is Labor; for Natural Resources, Land; and for Artificial Objects, Wealth. In technical Economic terms, therefore, all Wealth is produced from and upon Land by Labor.
Many colloquial and business subdivisions of those three categories may be useful provided they be not mixed in their meanings.
One of those subdivisions is Capital, which, in its technical meaning, is distinctively a part of Wealth produced by Labor from and upon Land. It is, however, often used loosely to include Land, the technical term for Natural Resources. Even slaves, and by Economic as well as by private business classification, have been placed in the subcategory called Capital, a form of Wealth; and this notwithstanding that as units of the human factor, slaves belong in the Labor category of Economics. Although such loose distinctions may be of use in private business accountings, they are intolerable in the science of Economics, which, like every other science, demands precision in the differentiation of terms.
The application of Man’s powers of body and mind to Natural Resources for the production of Artificial Objects—of Labor to Land for the production of Wealth—is the Productive Process in Economics. It involves such subcategories as business enterprise, professional service, invention, hired-man work—in a word, every grade of useful activity. These subcategories are developed by industrial specialization, or, in technical Economic terms, Division of Labor, which necessitates another subcategory. This is Trade.
Without Trade, products of Labor specialization would remain forever useless; but through Trade the most minute and incomplete of those products is brought to its useful place in the aggregate of Wealth—ploughshares to ploughframes, for instance, or ore to the steel of the factory, or wallpaper to the interior of the house.
The Productive Process though intricate through specialization and Trade, is readily observable by generalization into the three major categories, Labor and Land and Wealth. In observing that Process care must be taken to distinguish delivery from Distribution. Delivery is part of the Productive Process. No Wealth is completely produced until it has been delivered to ultimate consumers. But Distribution has to do with Wealth apportionment.
In apportionment, or Distribution, there are two major categories, Wages and Rent, corresponding respectively to the two Production categories, Labor and Land. A minor Distributive category, corresponding to the minor category in Production called Capital, is distinguished as Interest. This term identifies the earnings of Capital. Inasmuch, however, as Capital is part of Labor-produced Wealth, Interest must be a subdivision of Labor-earned Wages.
The Wages category in Distribution comprises, fundamentally, all that part of Labor-produced Wealth which is not allocated by natural Economic law to Rent for permission to use Land. This allocation is determined by the greater desirability of some Natural-Resource locations (Land) over the most desirable that may be had for the taking—of those at the “Margin of Production” as it is technically called, the “margin of cultivation” as it was called when agricultural areas alone were thought of as Land, at the Economic frontier as it may be most significantly described.
All assignments of Wealth in Distribution being determined by comparisons of desirability of service (Value measured in terms of Money), we find ourselves at the close of our brief review back at the Money surface of Economics where we began our delving expedition down to the Basic Facts.