[4] Author's note. It is quite possible in life for a transaction not only to be interpreted unreally, but also to take place unreally. Money and labour are not interchangeable values, but only money and the products of labour. Accordingly, if I give money for labour, I am doing something that is unreal. I am making a sham transaction. For in reality I can only give money for the product of labour. [5] Author's Note. The "rights of the matter" becomes the axiomatic basis for all economic activity under this relation of labour to the "rights" system; and the associations will have to accept these as a given premise in economic life. What this does, however, is to make economic organisation dependent upon man, instead of man being dependent upon the system of economics. [6] Author's Note. A sound proportion between the prices of made goods can only be achieved in economic life as an outcome of social administration, that springs up in this way from the free co-operation of the three branches of the body social. The proportion between prices must be such, that anyone working receives as counter-value for what he has produced so much as is necessary to satisfy his total wants and the wants of those belonging to him, until he has again turned out a product of equivalent labour. It is impossible to fix such a price-relation officially in advance; it must come as the resultant of living co-operation between the associations actively at work in the body social. Prices will however certainly settle down into such a normal relationship, provided the joint work of the associations rests on a healthy co-operation between the three divisions of social life. One may rely on the result as securely as on having a safe bridge, when it is built according to the proper laws of mathematics and mechanics. It may be said, that social life does not invariably obey its own laws, like a bridge. This facile objection however will not be made by anyone able to recognise, that it is primarily the laws of life, and not the laws of mathematics, which all through this book are conceived as underlying social life. [7] Author's Note. It may be urged, that the "rights" relations and the economic relations form one indivisible whole in actual reality. This however misses the point of what is meant by the threefold division. Of course, in the mutual intercourse and exchange that goes on between the various social organisms, taken as a collective process, the two different sorts of relations,--between their "rights" systems and their economic systems,--work together as a single whole. But it is a different matter, whether one makes rights regulations to suit the requirements of economic intercourse, or whether one first shapes them by the common sense of right, and then takes the combined result, whatever it may be.