The Bastiat Collection by Frédéric Bastiat

Author:Frédéric Bastiat [Bastiat, Frédéric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61016-200-5
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 2011-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

5

OF VALUE

All dissertations are wearisome—a dissertation on Value the most wearisome of all. What unpracticed writer, who has had to face an Economic problem, has not tried to resolve it without reference to any definition of value?

Yet he soon finds he has engaged in a vain attempt. The theory of Value is to Political Economy what numbers are to arithmetic. In what inextricable confusion would not Bezout have landed himself if, to save labor to his pupils, he had undertaken to teach them the four rules and proportion, without having previously explained the value the figures derive from their form and position?

The truth is, if the reader could only foresee the beautiful consequences deducible from the theory of Value, he would undertake the labor of mastering the first principles of Economical Science with the same cheerfulness that one submits to the drudgery of Geometry, in prospect of the magnificent field it opens to our intelligence.

But this intuitive foresight is not to be expected; and the more pains I should take to establish the distinction between Value and Utility, or between Value and labor, in order to show how natural it is that this should form a stumbling-block at the very threshold of the science, the more wearisome I should become. The reader would see in such a discussion only barren and idle subtleties, calculated at best to satisfy the curiosity of professional Economists.

You are inquiring laboriously, it may be said, whether wealth consists in the Utility of things, or in their Value, or in their rarity. Is not this like the question of the schoolmen, Does form reside in the substance or in the accident? Are you not afraid that some street Moliere will hold you up to public ridicule at the Theatre des Varietes?

Yet truth obliges me to say that, from an economical point of view, Society is Exchange. The primary element of Exchange is the notion of Value, so that every truth and every error this word introduces into men’s minds is a social truth or error. I undertake in this work to demonstrate the Harmony of those laws of Providence that govern human society. What makes these laws harmonious and not discordant is, that all principles, all motives, all springs of action, all interests, co-operate toward a grand final result, which humanity will never reach by reason of its native imperfection, but to which it will always approximate more and more by reason of its unlimited capability of improvement. And that result is, the indefinite approximation of all classes toward a level, which is always rising; in other words, the equalization of individuals in the general amelioration.

But to attain my object, I must explain two things, namely,

First, that Utility has a tendency to become more and more gratuitous, more and more common, as it gradually recedes from the domain of individual appropriation.

Second, that Value, on the other hand, which alone is capable of appropriation, which alone legitimately constitutes property and in fact, has a tendency to diminish more and more in relation to the utility to which it is attached.

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