That would be a violation of liberty: for, in depriving me of the
power of choice, you condemn me to pay the highest price; you
destroy competition, the sole guarantee of cheapness, and
encourage smuggling. In this way, to avoid commercial
absolutism, you would rush into administrative absolutism; to
create equality, you would destroy liberty, which is to deny
equality itself. Would you group producers in a single workshop
(supposing you to possess this secret)? That again does not
suffice: it would be necessary also to group consumers in a
common household, whereby you would abandon the point. We are
not to abolish the idea of value, which is as impossible as to
abolish labor, but to determine it; we are not to kill
individual liberty, but to socialize it. Now, it is proved that
it is the free will of man that gives rise to the opposition
between value in use and value in exchange: how reconcile this
opposition while free will exists? And how sacrifice the latter
without sacrificing man?

Then, from the very fact that I, as a free purchaser, am judge of
my own wants, judge of the fitness of the object, judge of the
price I wish to pay, and that you on the other hand, as a free
producer, control the means of production, and consequently have
the power to reduce your expenses, absolutism forces itself
forward as an element of value, and causes it to oscillate
between utility and opinion.

But this oscillation, clearly pointed out by the economists, is
but the effect of a contradiction which, repeating itself on a
vast scale, engenders the most unexpected phenomena. Three years
of fertility, in certain provinces of Russia, are a public