You know the old problem of the hen and the egg--which was first? The Socialist’s labor-value puzzle is much more perplexing, because, in addition to a lot of other things, you are called upon to find out which was first, the worker or the commodity which he consumed--the clothes he wore, the food he ate, the bed in which he slept while acquiring the strength for the work that produced this commodity. If you were called upon to answer this question, to fix the value of even a single article, you would find the task anything but an easy one. Can you imagine what will happen when the government functionaries sit down to figure out this problem for every kind of article that is sold--anywhere in the world? But, don’t imagine that their task ends here. When they have once succeeded in getting this puzzle solved, they will next be called upon to find out how many persons have contributed their labor toward the production of each and all of the commodities that have entered into the transaction. Benedict Elder, in exposing this particular absurdity of Socialism in _The Common Cause_ (September, 1912), illustrated his argument by showing the difficulties that the Socialist statisticians will face when they are called upon to find the value of the labor necessary in producing an ordinary pin. As it is difficult to obtain a more striking example, we may well follow Mr. Elder’s calculations. To find the value of the labor of making a pin, it is necessary to begin by getting the exact time expended by every person who has contributed a necessary part towards the production of the pin. This includes the time of the man who sells the pin to you over the counter--for, of course, there will have to be salesmen under Socialism--the time spent by the miner who dug the metal from the earth and by every other individual who has had anything to do in handling it. Talk about tracing your ancestry back to the days of William the Conqueror--that would be a “cinch” compared to this kind of mental gymnastics! Yet our Socialist statisticians are not finished with their work, even yet! Before they can tell the cashier how much to pay the worker so as to give him the full value of his labor in producing the pin, they must also determine how much labor-power each man spent in doing his part of this work and how many commodities, and how much of each, the man consumed to produce the labor-power necessary to complete the task assigned to him.