or 17 or 16, cultivation will also be extended to that point. And, thus, to say that rent will be the excess in productiveness over the yield at the margin, or lowest point, of cultivation, is the same thing as to say that it will be the excess of produce over what the same amount of labor and capital obtains in the least remunerative occupation.
The law of rent is, in fact, but a deduction from the law of competition, and amounts simply to the assertion that as wages and interest tend to a common level, all that part of the general production of wealth which exceeds what the labor and capital employed could have secured for themselves, if applied to the poorest natural agent in use, will go to land owners in the shape of rent. It rests, in the last analysis, upon the fundamental principle, which is to political economy what the attraction of gravitation is to physics—that men will seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.
This, then, is the law of rent. Although many standard treatises follow too much the example of Ricardo, who seems to view it merely in its relation to agriculture, and in several places speaks of manufactures yielding no rent, when, in truth, manufactures and exchange yield the highest rents, as is evinced by the greater value of land in manufacturing and commercial cities, thus hiding the full importance of the law, yet, ever since the time of Ricardo, the law itself has been clearly apprehended and fully recognized. But not so its corollaries. Plain as they are, the accepted doctrine of wages (backed and fortified not only as has been hitherto explained, but by considerations whose enormous weight will be seen when the logical conclusion toward which we are tending is reached) has hitherto prevented their recognition.[1]
- ↑ Buckle (Chap. II., History of Civilization) recognizes the necessary relation between rent, interest, and wages, but evidently never worked it out.
