Is the employer justified in withholding the full living wage from his employés to provide himself with the normal rate of interest on the capital that he has invested in the enterprise? Speaking generally, he is not. In the first place, the right to any interest at all, except as a return for genuine sacrifices in saving, is not certain but only presumptive.[244] Consequently it has no such firm and definite basis as the right to a living wage. In the second place, the right to interest, be it ever so definite and certain, is greatly inferior in force and urgency. It is an axiom of ethics that when two rights conflict, the less important must give way to the more important. Since all property rights are but means to the satisfaction of human needs, their relative importance is determined by the relative importance of the ends that they serve; that is, by the relative importance of the dependent needs. Now the needs that are supplied through interest on the employer's capital are slight and not essential to his welfare; the needs that are supplied through a living wage are essential to a reasonable life for the labourer. On the assumption that the employer has already taken from the product sufficient to provide a decent livelihood, interest on his capital will be expended for luxuries or converted into new investments; a living wage for the labourer will all be required for the fundamental goods of life, physical, mental, or moral. Evidently, then, the right to interest is inferior to the right to a living wage. To proceed on the contrary theory is to reverse the order of nature and reason, and to subordinate essential needs and welfare to unessential needs and welfare. Nor can it be maintained that the capitalist-employer's claim to interest is a claim upon the product prior to and independent of the claim of the labourer to a living wage. That would be begging the question. The product is in a fundamental sense the common property of employer and employés. Both parties have co-operated in turning it out, and they have equal claims upon it, in so far as it is necessary to yield them a decent livelihood. Having taken therefrom the requisites of a decent livelihood for himself, the employer who appropriates interest at the expense of a decent livelihood for his employés, in effect treats their claims upon the common and joint product as essentially inferior to his own. If this assumption were correct it would mean that the primary and essential needs of the employés are of less intrinsic importance than the superficial needs of the employer, and that the employés themselves are a lower order of being than the employer. The incontestable fact is that such an employer deprives the labourers of access to the goods of the earth on reasonable terms, and gives himself an access thereto that is unreasonable.