“There are few employments in which extraordinary powers of body and mind do not receive an extraordinary remuneration. It is the privilege of talent to work not only better but _more easily_. It will generally be found, therefore, that the commodity or service produced by a first-rate workman, while it sells for more than an average price, has _cost less than an average amount of labor_, [_i. e._, disutility.]”[153] Said Ricardo: The principle of value is that labor cost regulates it; but this principle is considerably modified by the fact that the values of different commodities have to include different proportions of “profit.” Piecing together for ourselves what Senior says, it is his position that the value of commodities must include (if the commodities are to be produced) rent, profits, and wages; rent and profits, being different percentages in the whole entrepreneur’s cost of different goods, make values out of proportion to labor cost; there is no necessity of considering profits as an element in entrepreneur’s costs approximately in proportion to wages; and lastly, wages are not in proportion to labor, which is disutility.[154] CHAPTER IX JOHN STUART MILL 1. Though Mill regarded his exposition of the theory of value with great satisfaction—a fact that has occasioned innumerable thrusts at him since—his contributions to the whole subject were not great, considering the work of Ricardo, the criticisms of it by Malthus, and the abundance of suggestions in the writings of Senior. His terminological faults are gross, and in many places his thought is very loose. His entire discussion of value, above all, lacks precision. By value is to be understood exchange value, general power of purchasing, and Mill insists strongly on the necessity of keeping in mind that a general rise or fall of value so defined is “unthinkable.” Value is purely a relative term. The conditions essential to value are utility and difficulty of attainment. Difficulty of attainment may “consist in an absolute limitation of supply” or in “the labour and expense requisite to produce the commodity.”[155] When, in the latter event, labor is applied under conditions of diminishing returns, a third case of value is distinguished for separate treatment. Following Malthus in his important innovation of giving the “empirical account” precedence, Mill begins with the assertion that the law of value of the first class of things—namely, those under an absolute limitation of supply—is merely the law of supply and demand. “There is another law for that much larger class of things which admit of indefinite multiplication.”[156] This is a law of entrepreneur’s costs of production. While demand and supply rule alone in a certain field, and rule over the oscillations of value in all fields, in the case of reproducible goods,