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Smith's Uniform “Toil and Trouble”: A “Vain Subtlety?”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Glenn Hueckel
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Extract

The subject of this essay is best introduced by two statements written many years apart. One is by J. S. Mill:

[Adam Smith] speaks as if labour were intrinsically the most proper measure of value, on the ground that one day's ordinary muscular exertion of one man, may be looked upon as always, to him, the same amount of effort or sacrifice. But this proposition, whether in itself admissible or not, discards the idea of exchange value altogether, substituting a totally different idea, more analogous to value in use. If a day's labour will purchase in America twice as much of ordinary consumable articles as in England, it seems a vain subtlety to insist on saying that labour is of the same value in both countries, and that it is the value of the other things which is different. Labour, in this case, may be correctly said to be twice as valuable, both in the market and to the labourer himself, in America as in England (Mill, 1909, p. 567).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 215 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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