“Natural price is that which we must give in order to obtain the article we want from the great warehouse of nature, and is the same thing as cost of production.”[104] In primitive times this was labor; in present times it is capital. Torrens really attempted an “empirical” law,[105] namely, that the exchange values of commodities are _determined by_ their cost in capital to the entrepreneur, but are in excess of the cost by a constant percentage. Exchange values are still determined by the cost, because the percentage of this excess is reckoned on the cost. In criticism of this, it is easy to show that, as an empirical account, the only possible way of defining entrepreneur’s cost to show that it does regulate value is to include interest (“profits”) in the cost. The “philosophical” account is brought to bear on the law of entrepreneur’s costs only to injure its statement. Interest is a part of the cost of any particular commodity, in the sense that it must be paid to call forth capital to aid in its production, just as wages must be paid to call forth labor. If interest be excluded from entrepreneur’s costs, the statement of Torrens that the value of the product will still be in proportion to cost cannot bear the slightest examination. The total process of the production of most goods is conducted by a series of entrepreneurs. If we take any two commodities of equal market value, the briefest consideration will show that their costs of production (in the sense employed by Torrens), merely to the last entrepreneur making them, may be quite unequal. As Ricardo pointed out, if one commodity takes longer to market after the entrepreneur makes his outlay than another, the amount of profits which its market value must afford will be greater, so that its cost (as Torrens defines it) must be less. But considering the entire cost of production to the series of entrepreneurs, the “profits” of each entrepreneur increase the necessary money outlay of the next entrepreneur succeeding him, who uses the product of the first as production goods. If Torrens should permit the profits of entrepreneurs earlier in the series surreptitiously to be included in the cost to later entrepreneurs, he would be abandoning his definition of cost. But if he excludes this element of profits to the whole series from the cost to the whole series, it is not true (for the same reason which applied to the case of the single entrepreneurs) that the values would be in proportion to costs of production. 6. Unfortunately, the influence of the philosophical account upon the thought of Torrens did not exhaust itself in the havoc it played with his theory of entrepreneur’s cost. Perforce, he must give a new version of the theory of labor cost intended to bring it into complete harmony with the empirical law of costs. This theory is: