This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 Excerpt: ...of capital.2 Were this not true, neither labor nor capital would be an economic agent. Diminishing or limited returns to increasing quantities of complementary agents are, of course, essential to the productivity of any agent. They play the part that limitation plays in the valuation of a consumers' good. Sec. 25. The ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 Excerpt: ...of capital.2 Were this not true, neither labor nor capital would be an economic agent. Diminishing or limited returns to increasing quantities of complementary agents are, of course, essential to the productivity of any agent. They play the part that limitation plays in the valuation of a consumers' good. Sec. 25. The view that rent is an income transferred from the consumer to the landlord was especially common among the older economists, and still survives. It is most clearly stated by Sismondi, Buchanan, and Ricardo. It is the only part of the product of labor of which the value is purely nominal, devoid of reality. It is, in fact, the result of the augmentation in price which a seller obtains by virtue of his privileges, without which the commodity would really be worth more.3 The high price in which the rent or net surplus originates, while it enriches the landlord, who has the produce of agriculture to sell, 1 Ricardo, Political economy, 63. 2 Clark, Distribution of wealth, passim; also, Hobson, The law of the three rents, Quarterly Journal of Economics, V, 270. 'Sismondi, De la richesse commerciale (cited by Malthus, Political economy, 138). diminishes, in the same proportion, the wealth of those who are its purchasers, and on this account it is quite inaccurate to consider the landlord's rent as a clear addition to the national wealth.1 It must then be admitted that Mr. Sismondi and Mr. Buchanan, for both their opinions are substantially the same, were correct when they considered rent as a value purely nominal, and as forming no addition to the national wealth, but merely as a transfer of value, advantageous only to the landlords and proportionably injurious to the consumer.2 The same view appears sometimes in a slightly different form: "Rent, ...
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