Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/45

 we easily fall into the fallacy which tells us that a thing must be valuable because a certain amount of work and energy have been put into it. Work and energy may be lavished on the production of something that nobody wants, but if there is no demand for it it will have no economic value.

Economic text-books tell us that there are goods, such as air, which are essential to life and so have incalculable "value in use" but are provided by nature to an unlimited extent and so have no "value in exchange." Thereby they merely confuse themselves and their readers. Obviously nobody will pay for anything that is given to him free, except perhaps the American millionaire who left his hotel because he was not charged enough to enable him to feel that he was really "having a good time." Air, when it is supplied by Nature, has no value in an economic sense because no one will give anything for it, and to say that, it has a "value in use" because we should pay all that we have for it if it was not there, is only to introduce a quite irrelevant confusion into economics, which is ultimately an inquiry into the terms on which men produce and exchange goods. When and where air is scarce it is paid for. The Central London Railway