Further discussion of this subject must be attended by extreme difficulties. For in endeavoring to ascertain what Smith meant, or “ought to have meant,” we encounter the difficulties due to the laxness and paucity of Smith’s explanations superposed on the difficulties inherent in this intricate subject. His various expressions suggest that his labor theory of value means more than the thought that the disutility of each person’s labor may measure the “subjective” value _to that person_ of commodities obtained by him in exchange for his own labor.[41] Smith speaks of labor as the “real measure of exchangeable value.” The exchange-value of a commodity in a given market is the same, whoever its owner may be and whatever may be his needs, or the relation of this commodity to his particular needs. This relation may give it value _to_ him; but we would never speak of the commodity’s exchange-value _to_ him. This independence of market-value from the particular needs of the particular owner is one of the things desired to be conveyed by the Austrian economists in their term, “_objective_ exchange-value.” Now Smith fails to distinguish between the “real worth” of goods and their “exchangeable value.” There can be no doubt that he would be quite willing to speak of the “real exchangeable value” of a good as being that which is measured by labor.[42] Thus, I believe, Smith conceives of a “real worth” independent of worth to any particular person. This “real worth” in a good is measurable by the labor commanded in exchange for the good, because, as he first suggests, labor, as productive power, is the homogeneous source-stuff of commodities. But secondly, the suggestion enters that a unit of labor is also a unit of disutility, a unit assumed to have an independent and invariable significance. This kind of real worth and such a unit of disutility are compounded abstractions. No one can hold it against a concept, except in the infancy of thought, that it is an abstraction, but, after my best effort, I for one cannot see that these concepts are meaningful abstractions.