All over the world where you have rich people spending money foolishly they are asked, for things that they buy, prices altogether out of keeping with the real value of the things. If you go into one of the big hotels in London or Paris and have a dinner the _economic values_ you consume are anything from a quarter to a tenth of the sum you are asked to pay. Thus people who buy a bottle of champagne in this sort of place pay from a pound to thirty shillings. The economic values contained in a bottle of champagne, that is the economic values which are built up by the labour of all sorts which has been expended in producing it, come to about two shillings and sixpence. So when people pay from a pound to thirty shillings for a bottle of champagne they are paying from eight to twelve times the real economic values which are destroyed in consumption. There is an extra margin of anything from seventeen shillings and sixpence to twenty-seven shillings and sixpence, which is an _economic imaginary_ in that one case alone. And remember that this economic imaginary goes the rounds. It appears in the profits of the hotel-keeper, which are assessed in the total national income for taxation. It appears in the rent for his hotel, since a man will pay much more rent for a house in which he can get people to pay these sums than for a humbler hotel of the same size and of the same true economic value in bricks and mortar. It appears in the rates which the hotel pays to the local authorities, and which in their turn appear in the income of humble officials living in the suburbs. That economic imaginary created by the silly person who is willing to pay from a pound to thirty shillings for a thing worth two shillings and sixpence appears over and over again in the various assessments of the country. Here is another case (3): _economic imaginaries due to inequality of income_. Supposing you have a thousand families with £1,000 a year each; that is, a total income among them of £1,000,000 a year. Supposing you put up for competition among those families a very beautiful picture which everybody would like to have; painted, say, by Van Dyck. None of these people with £1,000 a year each could afford to give more than a certain sum for the picture, and probably, when they had competed for it, it would fetch no more than £100. An official estimating that community would say that it had £1,000,000 a year income, such and such values in houses, etc., and that there was a picture present worth £100, and all that would go down in his estimates or “Assessment.”