There is seeming antagonism between the law of entrepreneur’s cost and the utility theory of value. For, according to the latter, the value of production goods is derived solely from the value of their products. Value originates in human satisfaction, flows out to those consumption goods upon which the satisfaction is immediately dependent (_i. e._, by which it is conditioned), from these flows out to the production goods upon which the consumption goods as products are dependent for their existence. From these on, the flow of value continues to those production goods which are still farther removed, and so on, rank by rank, until unproduced agents are reached. Put in other words, raw material, machinery and similar goods, have value solely because the entrepreneur can afford to pay for them, and this he can do solely because his products have value. If value conduction runs from product to production goods, how can value determination run in the reverse direction, from production goods to product? If the stream runs from the spring, we know that the volume of the spring must determine the volume of the stream and not the contrary. But does not the law of entrepreneur’s cost assert that the value of production goods _determines_ the value of products? The solution of the enigma of this apparent conflict of the utility theory with the great empirical law of cost (in its common form of statement) is one of the most interesting and important products of the acute thinking of the Austrian economists.