876 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 
for human consumption and personal satisfaction among the 
wage-earning classes by the proportions which the ownership of 
fixed or monopolised capital-producing instruments, &c., show 
among the people generally. 
The fallacy, however, is so thoroughly interwoven in the 
literature and sayings of the mass of the people that it is almost 
impossible to expose its absurdity; but when we consider that 
man lives by current or annual productions per se, and not upon 
fixed capital or their nominal values, whether annual or capital, 
and when, moreover, we discern that services currently rendered, 
whether by instrument, skilled mind or hand, constitute the base 
of what forms the purchasing power or claim over wealth being 
produced for consumption and personal satisfaction, it is only 
then we are able to perceive that the distribution of real wealth, 
so far as man’s needs and satisfactions are concerned, are 
determined, not as fallaciously assumed by the proportion of 
ownership which each man holds of the statistician’s wealth—+z.e., 
the fixed nonpersonally-consumable instruments, and which the 
owner no more consumes than the servants who control them—but 
strictly by the express measure which services of various degrees 
of exchange value have enabled each worker to constitute a claim 
upon the aggregate of all such services whose values are contained 
and incorporated in the current production of actual wealth. 
It is not here contended that the time labour of each individual 
labourer or instrument has the power to create equality of claim 
in correspondence with time effort : that is too obviously unequal ; 
but it is contended that every such effort, usefully directed, 
constitutes a definite claim, and, therefore, the true distribution 
of wealth in the community—wealth in consumption being the 
major factor y determined by the average 
annual earnings or claims upon wealth. The proportion of fixed 
wealth owned by individuals affords no clue to current distribution 
of total wealth. It can merely show how the 30 per cent. devoted 
to fixed instruments is distributed. 
If the proportion be large it insures probably a claim to the 
extent of 4, 5, or 6 per cent. of his capital upon real wealth, upon 
which the owner exists, and which may give a considerable 
purchasing power to the individual without any current personal 
exertion ; but it must not be forgotten that the fixed capital of 
a manager may be almost nil, while his skilled directing services 
may enable him to create a yearly claim of £1,000 value upon 
wealth produced for immediate human uses, while the fixed 
instrument of a helpless widow, owner (say) of £10,000 capital 
value, may only afford her a claim of half the amount (or £500) 
falling to the manager, whose fixed capital is reckoned ag nil in 
the usual Statistician’s estimates of the capital wealth of a 
country. 
