All this bears on the law of "natural" wages and interest as follows, taking that law of just remuneration at Mr. Clark's rating of it. The law works out through the mediation of price. Price is determined, competitively, by marginal producers or sellers and marginal consumers or purchasers: the latter alone on the one side get the precise price-equivalent of the disutility incurred by them, and the latter alone on the other side pay the full price-equivalent of the utilities derived by them from the goods purchased.[23] Hence the competitive price--covering competitive wages and interest--does not reflect the consensus of all parties concerned as to the "effective utility" of the goods, on the one hand, or as to their effective (disutility) cost, on the other hand. It reflects instead, if anything of this kind, the valuations which the marginal unfortunates on each side concede under stress of competition; and it leaves on each side of the bargain relation an uncovered "surplus," which marks the (variable) interval by which price fails to cover "effective utility." The excess utility--and the conceivable excess cost--does not appear in the market transactions that mediate between consumer and producer.[24] In the balance, therefore, which establishes itself in terms of value between the social utility of the product and the remuneration of the producer's "efficiency," the margin of utility represented by the aggregate "consumer's surplus" and like elements is not accounted for. It follows, when the argument is in this way reduced to its hedonistic elements, that no man "is paid an amount that equals the amount of the total product that he personally creates." Supposing the marginal-utility (final-utility) theories of objective value to be true, there is no consensus, actual or constructive, as to the "effective utility" of the goods produced: there is no "social" decision in the case beyond what may be implied in the readiness of buyers to profit as much as may be by the necessities of the marginal buyer and seller. It appears that there is warrant, within these premises, for the formula: Remuneration <> than Product. Only by an infinitesimal chance would it hold true in any given case that, hedonistically, Remuneration = Product; and, if it should ever happen to be true, there would be no finding it out.