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themselves, but by those employers of labour who are both able and willing to pay the quantity of money or of commodities, whether great or small, which is necessary in the actual circumstances of the society to command the required quantity of labour.
In the two last sections, the causes which affect and determine the exchangeable values of commodities have been investigated; and these appear to consist of every circumstance which contributes in any degree to enhance the difficulty of obtaining them: such as, the necessity of paying the wages of a certain quantity of labour, without which the commodity cannot be produced, the necessity of certain advances of other capital, which no one will continue to make without the ordinary remuneration in the shape of profits, and the frequent necessity of further payments owing to rents, tithes, taxes, natural and artificial monopolies, and temporary deficiencies of supply, arising from accident, or the state of the seasons. These are all sources of difficulty, which, in proportion to the degree in which they prevail, must raise the exchangeable value of commodities arising from intrinsic causes; and it has further appeared, that the result of all these causes of value is expressed in the state of the supply compared with the intensity of the demand.
We come now to inquire more particularly into the measures of value—an inquiry obviously not identical with an inquiry into the causes of value, as it is only in a very few cases that they can properly be represented by the same object.[1]
- ↑ The labour worked up in a commodity is the principal cause of its value, but it will appear in this chapter that it is not a measure of it. The labour which a commodity will command is not the cause of its value, but it will appear in the next chapter to be the measure of it.