necessities. The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last
of the schoolmen was Karl Marx."
The labour theory of value has two aspects, one ethical, the other economic. That is to say, it may
assert that the value of a product ought to be proportional to the labour expended on it, or that in
fact the labour regulates the price. The latter doctrine is only approximately true, as Locke
recognizes. Nine tenths of value, he says, is due to labour; but as to the other tenth he says
nothing. It is labour, he says, that puts the difference of value on everything. He instances land in
America occupied by Indians, which has almost no value because the Indians do not cultivate it.
He does not seem to realize that land may acquire value as soon as people are willing to work on
it, and before they have actually done so. If you own a piece of desert land on which somebody
else finds oil, you can sell it for a good price without doing any work on it. As was natural in his
day, he does not think of such cases, but only of agriculture. Peasant proprietorship, which he
favours, is inapplicable to such things as large-scale mining, which require expensive apparatus
and many workers.
The principle that a man has a right to the produce of his own labour is useless in an industrial
civilization. Suppose you are employed in one operation in the manufacture of Ford cars, how is
any one to estimate what proportion of the total output is due to your labour? Or suppose you are
employed by a railway company in the transport of goods, who can decide what share you shall be
deemed to have in the production of the goods? Such considerations have led those who wish to
prevent the exploitation of labour to abandon the principle of the right to your own produce in
favour of more socialistic methods of organizing production and distribution.
The labour theory of value has usually been advocated from hostility to some class regarded as
predatory. The Schoolmen, in so far as they held it, did so from opposition to usurers, who were
mostly Jews. Ricardo held it in opposition to landowners, Marx to capitalists. But Locke seems to
have held it in a vacuum, without hostility to any class. His only hostility is to monarchs, but this
is unconnected with his views on value.
Some of Locke's opinions are so odd that I cannot see how to make them sound sensible. He says
that a man must not have so many plums that they are bound to go bad before he and his family
can eat them,