Page:Earle, Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty, 1920, 175.jpg

Rh of more than one mind! It is, therefore, impossible of ascertainment until that has taken place.

5th. That "free competition" thus becomes a necessary constitutional, "unalienable" right of all mankind, as through it alone their other "unalienable" rights can be ascertained, protected or enforced. For men can neither measure "just compensation" nor reach that certain definition or "standard" upon which to act, without which criminal punishment can neither be just nor constitutional. And since they are entitled constitutionally to "perfect equality of value" for property taken, and clarity of "standard," if charged with crime, their property cannot possibly be taken, or their Liberty destroyed by imprisonment, through the device of forcing them on behalf of a prosecuting government to guess what they and others might agree upon; their only constitutional right and guide being what has been actually and as a fact agreed upon by free men, acting in a free market and through "free competition." "What value determines is not how much a thing is desired, but how much any one is willing to give for it.  * * *  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.  It is never the amount of labor that has been exerted into bringing a thing into being that determines its value, but always the amount of labor that would be rendered in exchange for it. * * * It is not the exertion that a thing has cost in past times, that gives it value, but the exertion that its possession will in future time dispense with, for even the immediate is in strictness future. * * * 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