So does a manufacturer.
Farmers make money when they sell their produce profitably. Nor only when they sell it, but also while they cultivate it; for every day’s growth adds to the money measurement of a crop.
Wage-workers by the day, the week or month, and salary-workers by the year, also workers on commission or for percentages or for profits, make more or less money as working opportunities are more or less plentiful, and wages or salaries or percentage totals and profit totals are consequently higher or lower.
Engineers, lawyers, physicians, architects, dentists, clergymen, teachers—all professional workers,—make money to the extent of the marketability of the services they offer.
And investors, do they not invest by money measurements and in money terms for the purpose of obtaining Economic incomes measured by money and expressed in terms of money?
Manifestly, the immediate object of everybody’s activity in the field of Economics is to make money.
Does one desire food? By making money he gets food. Does one desire clothing? He gets it by making money. Does he wish for housing, furnishings, automobiles, railway or steamboat transportation, necessaries of any kind, luxuries of whatever variety, household service, professional service, legislative or judicial service, mechanical service, mercantile service, clerical service? By making money he gets them. Does one wish for slaves? If slavery be an institution of his time and place, he may have slaves by purchases with the money he makes. Should he be a slave himself, he may purchase his freedom with money if he can get it. Does land-ownership appeal to one? Let him make money and he can buy land. Whatever object the Economic field may offer for the satisfaction of human desires, that object is attainable by making money. In no other way can it be attained through Economic processes.
If gifts be cited as exceptions let the fact be noted that giving is not an Economic process. It lacks the element of exchange or trade. So, too, of theft in any of its forms. In genuine Economics there must be two gainers in every trade. There is no such science as Economics of the Forty Thieves variety.
Even in such seeming exceptions to the Economic importance of money as are offered by barter, in which no money passes and no money accounting is made, comparisons of the objects thus directly exchanged are nevertheless contemplated by the exchangers in terms of money. The owner of a horse that might sell for two hundred dollars, would not barter it for a horse that could sell for only one hundred—not unless he got “boot” enough to even up the money difference to his satisfaction. Nor would the boy with a two-dollar penknife “swap even” for a one-dollar jackknife. It is only when the two horses or the two knives seem to their respective owners to be approximately equal by money measurement that an “even swap” is conceivable.
Another seeming exception to the money-making characteristic of Economics depends upon individual isolation. That isolated individuals may gather food and improvise shelter and clothing without thinking of them in terms of money, is true enough; but the activities of persons thus isolated are not Economic exceptions, for the science of Economics is a social science. Although some Economic phases or phenomena may be picturesquely and aptly illustrated by reference to the experience, actual or imaginary, of isolated individuals like Robinson Crusoe on his island, states of human isolation are outside the limits of Economics.