tion of the advance of capital definitively forces the value of all goods away from exact correspondence with their labour costs. To illustrate. Say that the production of a commodity requiring ninety days for its manufacture is divided into three stages of thirty days' labour in each. Rodbertus would say that the product of the first thirty days' labour might only attain the value of twenty-five days' labour, while the second thirty attained the value of thirty days', and the third thirty of thirty-five days' labour. But on the whole the final value of the product would be equal to ninety days' labour. But it is a matter of common experience that, in normal successive production, the value of such a commodity will increase during the three stages by a definite amount, say 30 + 31 + 32, and that the final product will be equal to, say, ninety-three days of labour; i.e. a value greater than the value of the labour incorporated in it by the amount of the customary interest.
Besides this, Rodbertus deserves the severest censure that, in spite of his own admission, he always persists in developing the law of the distribution of all goods in wages and rent under the theoretical hypothesis that all goods possess "normal value"; that is, a value that corresponds to their labour costs. He thinks he is justified in doing this because the "normal value, in regard to the derivation both of rent in general and of land-rent and capital-rent in particular, is the least captious; it alone does not quietly beg the question, and assume what was first to be explained by it, as every value does in which is included beforehand an element for rent."
Here Rodbertus is grievously mistaken. He begs the question quite as improperly as any of his opponents ever did; only in an opposite way. His opponents, by their assumptions, have begged the question of the existence of interest. Rodbertus has begged the question of its non-existence. In taking no notice of the constant divergence from "normal value" (which divergence gives natural interest its source and its nourishment), he himself altogether abstracts the chief feature in the phenomenon of interest.
End of Notes
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