SOME COMMON PITFALLS

But the investor is not, as a necessary consequence, arobber. He has bought and paid for the right, economicand moral as well as legal, to enjoy the product ascribableto the capital goods he owns. The workers’ wages, underfree competition, constitute payment in full for what theyhad produced at the time their wages were paid.

Take the case of the tree which was planted with laborworth $5, and which, 25 years later, was worth $15.The socialist virtually asks, Why should not the laborerreceive $15 instead of $5 for his work? The answer is:He may receive it, provided he will wait for it 25 years.As Bohm-Bawerk says: 3

"The perfectly just proposition that the laborer should receive theentire value of his product may be understood to mean either thatthe laborer should now receive the entire 'present value of hisproduct, or should receive the entire future value of his productin the future. But Rodbertus and the Socialists expound it as if itmeans that the laborer should now receive the entire future valueof his product.”

Socialists would cease to think of interest as extortionif they would try the experiment of sending a colony oflaborers into the unreclaimed lands of the West, lettingthem develop and irrigate those lands and build railwayson them, unaided by borrowed capital. The colonistswould find that interest had not disappeared by anymeans, but that by waiting they had themselves reapedthe benefit of it. Let us say they waited five years beforetheir lands were irrigated and their railway completed.At the end of that time they would own every cent ofthe earnings of both, and no capitalist could be accused ofrobbing them of it. But they would find that, in spite ofthemselves, they had now become capitalists, and that

’Bohm-Bawerk , Capital and Interest, p. 342.

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