Thus the privilege of production is a real loss to
society, and publicity of industry, like competition between
laborers, a necessity. All the utopias ever imagined or
imaginable cannot escape this law.
Certainly I do not care to deny that labor and wages can and
should be guaranteed; I even entertain the hope that the time of
such guarantee is not far off: but I maintain that a guarantee of
wages is impossible without an exact knowledge of value, and that
this value can be discovered only by competition, not at all by
communistic institutions or by popular decree. For in this there
is something more powerful than the will of the legislator and of
citizens,--namely, the absolute impossibility that man should do
his duty after finding himself relieved of all responsibility to
himself: now, responsibility to self, in the matter of labor,
necessarily implies competition with others. Ordain that,
beginning January 1, 1847, labor and wages are guaranteed to all:
immediately an immense relaxation will succeed the extreme
tension to which industry is now subjected; real value will
fall rapidly below nominal value; metallic money, in spite of its
effigy and stamp, will experience the fate of the assignats; the
merchant will ask more and give less; and we shall find ourselves
in a still lower circle in the hell of misery in which
competition is only the third turn.
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