luxury. Man, through his aesthetic passion, is eager for the
trifles the possession of which would highly satisfy his vanity,
his innate desire for luxury, and his more noble and more
respectable love of the beautiful: upon this the dealers in this
class of articles speculate. To tax fancy and elegance is no
less odious or absurd than to tax circulation: but such a tax is
collected by a few fashionable merchants, whom general
infatuation protects, and whose whole merit generally consists in
warping taste and generating fickleness. Hence no one complains;
and all the maledictions of opinion are reserved for the
monopolists who, through genius, succeed in raising by a few
cents the price of linen and bread.

It is little to have pointed out this astonishing contrast
between useful value and exchangeable value, which the economists
have been in the habit of regarding as very simple: it must be
shown that this pretended simplicity conceals a profound mystery,
which it is our duty to fathom.

I summon, therefore, every serious economist to tell me,
otherwise than by transforming or repeating the question, for
what reason value decreases in proportion as production augments,
and reciprocally what causes this same value to increase in
proportion as production diminishes. In technical terms, useful
value and exchangeable value, necessary to each other, are
inversely proportional to each other; I ask, then, why scarcity,
instead of utility, is synonymous with dearness. For--mark it
well--the price of merchandise is independent of the amount of
labor expended in production; and its greater or less cost does
not serve at all to explain the variations in its price. Value