1891.] 167 [Baird- 



under "Interest " things that are not interest at all. Interest is the com- 

 pensation paid for the use of the instrument called money, and its substi- 

 tute, credit, always expressed in a money of account, and for them alone. 



This instrument, money, is the great instrument of association — that one 

 thing, the possession of which, with its quality of universal acceptability, 

 in highly organized — civilized — society, commands all other things to which 

 we attach the idea of value. To talk of the rent of a house, a farm, or a 

 garden, the freight or passage paid to a railroad, or a steamship, or a 

 steamboat company, or proprietor, or the porterage in a cart, or a wheel- 

 barrow, as interest, is to add a new and most vicious element of confusion 

 to that despair of thoughtful men, that fruitful parent of misery to man- 

 kind, the "Dismal Science." The very word agio, which Dr. Bolim- 

 Bawerk would apply to all manner of goods, wares and merchandise, had 

 its origin with reference to a money of account, and to this hour it can be 

 applied to or qualify no manner or form of thing not expressed in a money 

 of account. 



Further, Dr. Bohm-Bawerk has jumbled up the profit that a capitalist 

 can make out of his own business ventures over and above the profit im- 

 agined to be properly due to his own time and labor, with the interest 

 problem. Thus does he further and hopelessly bemuddle the subject of 

 interest. He calls this profit, which is not interest at all, interest, and which 

 it is impossible to separate from the results of the personal exertions, 

 sagacity, experience, and risks of the capitalist — "natural interest." 

 Where, in nature, will he find interest, where trade, money, credit, houses, 

 ships, railroads, tools, wagons, wheelbarrows, textile fabrics— where, I 

 would ask, without the application of human labor, any single commodity 

 to which we attach the idea of value? Are not civilized society and all 

 its appliances for forwarding trade, commerce, production and consump- 

 tion, purely the work of man, and hence artificial? Is not this natural 

 interest a collocation without meaning? Is not this doctrine of Dr. Bohm- 

 Bawerk's, to use his own words, as applied to Carey, " one of those theo- 

 ries which cast discredit, not only on their authors, but on the science that 

 lets itself be seduced into credulous acceptance of them, not so much that 

 it errs, as for the unpardonably blundering way in which it errs?" For 

 one, not only do I think that it is so, but to me it is a source of wonder 

 and amazement, that the perpetrator of such blundering can criticise others 

 in the severe and arrogant terms in which Dr. Bohm-Bawerk has done. 



But what is to be thought of his treatment of Carey ? Why, that it is 

 simply infamous, for the reason that the necessary preliminary to refuting 

 and denouncing him as guilty of a "tissue of incredibly clumsy and 

 wanton mistakes " has been his misrepresentation. In order to refute 

 him, he has been forced to attempt to make it appear that Carey was 

 guilty of the stupidity of treating distribution, as Dr. Bohm-Bawerk has 

 done, as interest, not distribution. What Carey himself calls "the law of 

 distribution," he calls "Carey's interest theory." After quoting what 

 Carey distinctly states regarding distribution, and which he calls such, he 



