calamity, just as, in our vineyards, three years of abundance are
a calamity to the wine-grower I know well that the economists
attribute this distress to a lack of markets; wherefore this
question of markets is an important one with them. Unfortunately
the theory of markets, like that of emigration with which they
attempted to meet Malthus, is a begging of the question. The
States having the largest market are as subject to
over-production as the most isolated countries: where are high
and low prices better known than in the stock-exchanges of Paris
and London?

From the oscillation of value and the irregular effects resulting
therefrom the socialists and economists, each in their own way,
have reasoned to opposite, but equally false, conclusions: the
former have made it a text for the slander of political economy
and its exclusion from social science; the latter, for the
denial of all possibility of reconciliation, and the affirmation
of the incommensurability of values, and consequently the
inequality of fortunes, as an absolute law of commerce.

I say that both parties are equally in error.

1. The contradictory idea of value, so clearly exhibited by the
inevitable distinction between useful value and value in exchange
does not arise from a false mental perception, or from a vicious
terminology, or from any practical error; it lies deep in the
nature of things, and forces itself upon the mind as a general
form of thought,--that is, as a category. Now, as the idea of
value is the point of departure of political economy, it follows
that all the elements of the science--I use the word science in