6. We have here the remarkable instance of two writers nearly agreed on the number of exceptions to a principle, but quite disagreed as to what remains of the principle. The labor cost of a commodity in a modern market can influence its exchange value only by means of influencing its entrepreneur’s cost. Thus any cause which weakens the connection between the value of a commodity and its entrepreneur’s cost of production, thereby also weakens its connection with labor cost. Therefore, the first three points made by Malthus to show that entrepreneur’s costs do not exercise perfect control over actual market-values are relevant to the dispute about the labor-cost regulator. But, as the reader has observed, the three exceptions to the law of money costs are only such as have always been made to any proposition of static theory. A static law of value is supposed only to govern _normal value_ under competitive conditions. It is perfectly legitimate to put emphasis upon the causes of the variation of actual values from static standards, but on the principle, now so well understood, that actual conditions can be fully understood only by the preliminary establishment of static laws, the first three points of criticism made by Malthus, and admitted by Ricardo, must be judged to leave the law of costs a perfectly valid principle. If the only causes of variation of actual exchange values from the standard of labor costs were those causes which operate to weaken the law of entrepreneur’s costs, the Ricardian labor theory would remain a principle of the utmost importance. The attacks which the labor-cost theory cannot withstand are those directed against its validity _as a static principle_. It is an undisputed static principle that exchange values are in proportion to entrepreneur’s costs. Therefore, every time a cause is shown which throws entrepreneur’s costs out of proportion to labor cost, a heart-thrust is given the theory of the labor-cost regulator. To the list of causes of this kind granted by Ricardo, Malthus added one, an important one; or rather, he persisted in retaining what Adam Smith considered to be such a cause—rent of land. Malthus then discovered no new point; but he marshaled many points in an able manner. Considering only the weighty part of his case, his argument is that entrepreneur’s costs consist of wages, interest, and rent; that wages alone stand for labor cost;[125] that therefore the existence of the other two elements makes the total entrepreneur’s cost decidedly out of proportion to labor cost. This signifies not only that entrepreneur’s costs are composed of outlays in excess of payments for labor, but that when one entrepreneur’s cost is compared with that of another the two will (barring an accidental coincidence) not be to each other as the respective labor costs entering into them (through wages). Two commodities may have equal exchange values and equal entrepreneur’s