Mises gets the italics [with all emphasis mine], I get the regular font,:
Socialists and interventionists call profit and interest unearned income,
the result of depriving the workers of a considerable part of the fruits of their
effort. As they see it, the products come into existence through toiling as
such and nothing else, and should by rights benefit the toilers alone.
I'm sure we have all seen that argument, right?
Yet bare labor produces very little if not aided by the employment of the
outcome of previous saving and accumulation of capital.
In other words, the worker is offering his work right now, true. But the capitalist worked hard in the past, and what's more, did without. He saved his hard earned money, meaning he did not go out and party with it, but rather under consumed in order to buy things for his business. It is thanks to his efforts and his suffering that the worker does not have to work with his bare hands, which would earn him little to nothing.
The products are the outgrowth of a cooperation of labor with tools and other capital goods directed by provident entrepreneurial design.
In other words, brains are worth money, too. Besides the worker and the capitalist [the guy who underconsumed so the worker would have tools to work with], there is another partner here who deserves a little something, the entrepreneur. He is the brains behind the whole scheme, the Steve Jobs, if you will. If not for him, the worker would sit there picking his nose, and the capitalist would have a pile of money and not know what to do with it.
The savers, whose saving accumulated and maintains the capital, and the entrepreneurs, who channel the capital into those employments in which it best serves the consumers, are no less indispensable for the process of production than the toilers.
At this point all those Marxists out there should toss away their red flags and look for jobs. But for some reason I doubt this will happen.
It is nonsensical to impute the whole product to the purveyors of labor and to pass over in silence the contribution of the purveyors of capital and of entrepreneurial ideas.
What brings forth usable goods is not physical effort as such, but physical effort
aptly directed by the human mind toward a definite goal.
The greater (with the advance of general well-being) the role of capital goods, and the more efficient their utilization in the cooperation of the factors of production, the more absurd becomes the romantic glorification of the mere performing of manual
routine jobs.
Tell it like it is, Ludwig!
The marvelous economic improvements of the last two hundred
years were an achievement of the capitalists who provided the capital goods
required and of the elite of technologists and entrepreneurs.
The masses of the manual workers were benefitted by changes which they not only did not generate but which, more often than not, they tried to cut short.
The only possible response to this by a Marxist, I am guessing, is what they always answer with, irrelevant name calling. We look forward to hearing something logical, lefties. Have at it.
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