Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/170

 brought me to perceive and trace the intimate causal relations between a rate of saving excessive for home purposes and the drive for the exploitation of backward countries which is the economic core of imperialism. Thus I was launched upon two different yet not unrelated theses, a distinctively moral criticism of that bargaining process which is the core of distribution, and an equally distinctive political activity in which the profiteering motive played a determinant part.

In most of my closer reasoning my prime concern has been to give a consistent intelligible account of the bargaining process, so as to bring the “laws” of wages, rent, interest, and profit on to the same plane of statement. I found a law of rent, representing it as differential payments from a no-rent margin, which ignored the patent fact that for most uses of land the margin carried a positive rental. I found a law of wages that ignored the difference between the subsistence or replacement payment which counts in dealing with capital and land, and the positive wage-payment. I found a treatment of capital and interest which regarded them not as concrete factors in production, but as monetary figures. I found profit entirely vague in its origin and nature, sometimes including wages of management, costs of risk-taking, interest of capital, gains from profiteering, and what not. I cannot profess complete success in my attempt (in Distribution of Wealth) to put these different sources