It may be looked at from either angle, and treated in either way. A complete theory of distribution involves many of the most fundamental social values. Indeed, it is through the machinery of distribution that the non-economic values most vitally affect economic values. Wages, interest, competitive profits, are surely legal categories, and are possible only in a society where there is free labor and private control of industry. We may agree with Wieser[211] that, as categories of economic causation, interest, rent, and wages will remain even in a communistic society (and, doubtless, also profit and loss), but that is far from saying (as Wieser of course recognizes) that they would remain as distributive shares. Each social system has its own distributive scheme. But, in a system like that of Western civilization to-day, where human services and the uses of land and instrumental goods are offered in the market like other commodities, we may treat them in terms of the price analysis with as much propriety as the other commodities. The prices paid for them measure a complex of social forces, but we cannot always disentangle these social forces and measure them separately. It is hard to tell precisely how much influence on the price of labor has been exerted by a speech from Mr. Gompers, or a Federal injunction, or a law for the exclusion of certain classes of immigrants. If we wish to handle distribution quantitatively, we must do it superficially, studying in the market the effects which the underlying social forces manifest there with reference to the rewards of the different factors of production. This has been increasingly the case with later theories of distribution. If, on the other hand, we take the discussion which J. S. Mill gives in book II of his _Principles_, we shall find that the price analysis plays relatively little part, and that he considers chiefly the influence of the more fundamental social values.[212] A failure to recognize the distinction between value theory and price theory seems to lie behind the complaint which Professor Davenport makes against the "Social Value School" in his criticism of Professor Seligman: "As soon as we turn from the value problem to the separate treatment of the distributive shares, we find ourselves to have descended from the cloud-land mysteries of transcendental economics to the old and beaten paths of the traditional analysis."[213] To this complaint the obvious answer is that we have turned from fundamental value theory to abstract, quantitative price analysis. And the social value theorist has as much right to do this as has any other economist--in fact, if our theory be true, only on the basis of a social value doctrine has any economist a right (logically) to take up price analysis.