_Wages under Perfect Competition._--In the static state that we have assumed, competition works without let or hindrance. It does not work thus in the actual world, and we shall in due time take account of the obstacles it encounters; but what we are now studying is the standards to which such competition as there is--and it is in reality very active--is tending to make wages conform. We want to know what would happen in case this competition encountered no hindrance at all. This would require that a workman should be able to set employers bidding against each other for his services just as actively as an employer can make laborers bid against each other in selling their services. If this were the case, every unit of labor could get what it produces, no more and no less. Even a single man, offering himself to one employer after another, would virtually carry in his hands a potential product for sale. His coming to any man's mill would mean more goods turned out in a year by the mill; and if one employer would not pay him for them at their market value, another one would. The final unit of social labor can get, under perfectly free competition, the value of whatever things that labor, considered apart from capital, brings into existence. Moreover, each unit of labor by itself alone now produces, as we have seen, the same amount of commodity as the final unit, and can get the price of it. Now that they are all working together each one of them can place itself in the position of the final unit by leaving its present employment and offering its services elsewhere. _Wages regarded as Prices of Fractional Products adjusted by Perfect Competition._--Under the hypothesis of perfect competition, as the term has been used in our discussion, the venders of goods can get their market values. These values are fixed by the final utility law. Free competition means, then, not only that any average laborer who offers himself for hire virtually carries in his hands a potential but definite product for sale, but that he may confidently offer it at the price that is fixed by its final utility. Like other venders, the laborer can get the true value of his product and he can get no more. In an ideally perfect society organized on the competitive plan a man would be as dependent on his own productive power as he would be if he were alone in a wilderness. His pay would be his product; but that would be indefinitely larger than it could be in a wilderness or in any primitive state. The capital of other men and the organization that they maintain enable a worker to create and get far more than he could if he lived alone, even though, like Crusoe, he were monarch of his whole environment. It would be a losing bargain for the worker to surrender the product of mere labor in a state of civilization in exchange for what both labor and capital create in a state of savagery. CHAPTER IX THE LAW OF INTEREST