Do you believe this? Socialists do. As a practical man, do you imagine that any one method of employing capital will be just as successful as any other? If the laborer produces all value, and an article is valuable simply because of the labor there is in it, Mr. Hyndman and his master, Karl Marx, and the soap-box orator, who is telling you how to solve all of life’s problems by voting for the candidates on the Socialist ticket, are right. If this is not true, they are wrong, and you can’t get away from this conclusion. One might as well argue that an engine is sufficient unto itself and needs neither working capital in the form of fuel nor the directing hand of the engineer. There is another class of “capitalists” who receive comparatively little attention from the Socialists. These are the employers who make no profits upon their investment, who purchase material and pay their workers’ wages and who do not earn enough to reimburse themselves for their outlay. The commercial agencies which report business conditions have records of many such cases. Men go into business and fail; people put their money into stock companies and never receive dividends. The work is done; the labor is performed; but there is no surplus value of which the worker may be “robbed.” In this case are we to assume that the unfortunate investors are robbed by their workmen? Marx maintains that all capitalists are robbers. Are we therefore to believe that all capitalists are successful? We cannot deny that capital, and even the product of labor, may be transferred by the process of robbery. Before there can be any robbery, however, the capital or the value of the product must exist, and it is beyond the power of labor to call either _capital_ or _value_ into being. CHAPTER V YOUR OWN PAY ENVELOPE My dear Smith, Having seen that the Marxian theories of value are not the sanely “scientific” laws that Socialists declare them to be, but are utter absurdities that run counter to all laws of logic and even contradict human experience, we shall now get down to your own individual pay envelope, for that is the thing which most interests you. But, please don’t imagine that, because we have stopped talking about Marx’s theories for the moment, we have reached the end of our list of Socialist fallacies. To tell the truth, we have just begun to enumerate them. Silly as these ideas are in theory, they do not begin to attain the full limit of their absurdity until we attempt to apply them to the practical affairs of life. Last night I stood at the street corner and heard the soap-box orator “educate” the crowd. He told them that the average earnings of every worker in America was $2,500 a year--a trifle more than $48 a week--and he asked the men if they had found any such sum of money in their pay-envelope recently.