Page:Earle, Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty, 1920, 168.jpg

168 Harvester case; and, though it can be found in the works of other able economists, one of whom well says:

"What we deem the point of real value, or actual equivalence, we speak of as market value, from the old idea of the market or meeting place of those who wish to make exchanges, where competition or the higgling of the market brings out the highest bidding or the lowest offering in transactions of exchange. And when we wish to ascertain the exact value of a thing we offer it at auction or in some other way submit it to competitive offers.  * * *  Value is thus an expression which, when used in its proper economic sense of value in exchange, has no direct relation to any intrinsic quality of external things, but only to man's desires.  * * *  For the point of equivalence or equation that we express or assume when we speak of the value of a thing is a point where the desire to obtain i one mind so counterbalances in its effect on action the desire to retain in another mind that the thing itself may pass in exchange from the possession of one man to the possession of another with mutual willingness. Now this fact that the perception of value springs from a feeling of man, and has not at bottom any relation to the external world * * *  is what lies at the bottom of grotesque confusions. * * * Value has of course its origin in the feeling of desire. Thus it is that there is no measure of value among men save competition or the higgling of the market, a matter that might be worth the consideration of those amiable reformers who so lightly propose to abolish competition. * * * The law of competition is one of these natural laws,