Now supposing all but two of these thousand families to be impoverished by having to pay rents and interest to these two men. Supposing they were all reduced to just under £500 a year, and that the balance of £500,000 were paid to those other two. Then each of these would have £250,000 a year. The Van Dyck is put up for auction in this community. The poor families, of course, have no show at all. Not one of them can afford more than £50 at the most, however much he wanted the Van Dyck. But the two rich men can compete one against the other recklessly. They have an enormous margin of wealth with which to do what they like, and the Van Dyck between them may be rushed up to £50,000. There is not a penny more of real wealth in the community than there was before. Yet your Government assessor would come down and assess the community in a very different fashion from the way in which he would have assessed the first community. He will put down the total income at £1,000,000, and the houses, furniture, etc., at so much, and he will add: “Also a Van Dyck valued at £50,000.” Of course in real life, where are great differences of income, this sort of thing is multiplied by the thousand. It is another example of the way in which, as communities get more complicated in a high civilisation, economic imaginaries appear. I am only introducing this subject as a very simple addition to this little book, and I will not multiply instances too much, though one might go on giving examples almost indefinitely. Here, then, is a last one (4): _economic imaginaries due to the confusion between services and economic values attached to material things_. We saw at the beginning of this book that wealth did not consist in _things_, such as coal, chairs, tables, etc., but in the _economic values attached to those things_; that is, their added use for the purposes of human beings up to the point where they were beginning to be consumed. We saw how the coal in the earth has no economic value, how it begins to be of value when it begins to be mined, and how each piece of additional labour put into it to bring it nearer to the point of consumption adds to its economic value, until at last, when it gets into your cellar, from being worth nothing a ton (when it was still in the earth) it is worth thirty shillings or forty shillings a ton. But when people assess wealth for the purpose of taxation, and in order to find what (in their judgment) the total yearly income of a nation is, they count not only the economic values attached to things consumed by the nation, but also _services_.