he fact that present goods have a higher value than similar kinds of goods in the future, as one that is already put beyond dispute by the most ordinary experience of everyday life. If one were to give a thousand persons the choice whether they would rather take a gift of £100 to-day, or take it fifty years hence, surely all the thousand persons would prefer to take the £100 now. Or if one were to ask a thousand persons who wished a horse, and were disposed to give £100 for a good one, how much they would give now for a horse that they would only get possession of in ten or in fifty years, although as good an animal were guaranteed at that time, surely they would all name an infinitely smaller sum, if they named one at all; and thereby they would surely prove that everybody considers present goods to be more valuable than future goods of the same kind.
If this is so, that which has been made by our labourer in the first year, i.e. the fifth part of a steam-engine which is to be completed four years later, has not the entire value of a fifth part of an already completed engine, but has a smaller value.
How much smaller? That I cannot explain at present without anticipating my argument in a confusing way. Enough here to remark that it stands in a certain connection with the rate of interest usual in the country*43—a rate which is a matter of experience—and with the remoteness of the period at which the whole product will be completed. If we assume the usual rate of interest to be 5 per cent, then the product of the first year's labour will, at the close of the year, be worth about £100.*44 Therefore, according to the proposition that the labourer ought to receive his whole product, or its whole value, the wages due him for the first year's labour will amount to the sum of £100.
If, notwithstanding the above deductions, any one should have the impression that this sum is too small, let me offer the following for his consideration. No one will doubt that the labourer gets his full rights if at the end of five years he receives the entire steam-engine, or the whole value of £550. Let us calculate then for comparison's sake what would be the value of the part-wage anticipated as above at the end of the fifth year? The £100 which the labourer has received at the end of the first year can be put out at interest for the next four years—that is, till the end of the fifth year; at the rate of 5 per cent (without calculating compound interest), the £100 may therefore increase by £20—this course being open even to the wage-paid labourer. Thus, it is clear, the £100 paid at the end of the first year are equivalent to £120 at the end of the fifth. If the labourer then, for the fifth part of the technical labour, receives £100 at the end of a year, clearly he is paid according to a scale which puts him in as favourable a position as if he had received £550 for the whole labour at the expiry of five years.
But what do Rodbertus and the socialists suppose to be the application of the principle that the labourer should receive the whole value of his product? They would have the whole value that the completed engine will have at the end of the process of production applied to the payment of wages, but they would have this payment not made at the conclusion of the whole production, but spread proportionally over the whole course of the labour. We should consider well what that means. It means that the labourer in our example, through this averaging of the part payments, is to receive in two and a half years the whole of the £550 which will be the value of the completed steam-engine at the end of five years.
I must confess that I consider it absolutely impossible to base this claim on these premises. How should it be according to nature, and founded on the pure idea of justice, that any one should receive at the end of two and a half years a whole that he will only have produced in five years? It is so little "according to nature," that, on the contrary, in the nature of things it could not be done. It could not be done even if the labourer w