Property rights as they are circumscribed by laws and protected by courts and the police, are the outgrowth of an age-long evolution. The history of these ages is the record of struggles aiming at the [p. 655] abolition of private property. Again and again despots and popular movements have tried to restrict the rights of private property or to abolish it altogether. These endeavors, it is true, failed. But they have left traces in the ideas determining the legal form and definition of property.

In the frame of Ricardian economics the idea of rent was an attempt at a treatment of those problems which modern economics approaches by means of marginal-utility analysis.1  Ricardo’s theory appears rather unsatisfactory when judged from the point of view of present-day insight; there is no doubt that the method of the subjective-value theory is far supe

The starting point of the economic teachings concerning land is the distinction between two classes of original factors of production, viz., human and nonhuman factors. As the utilization of the nonhuman [p. 638] factors is as a rule connected with the power to utilize a piece of the earth, we speak of land when referring to them.4

The services a definite piece of land can render in a definite period of time are limited. If they were unlimited, men would not consider land a factor of production and an economic good. However, the quantity of soil available is so vast, nature is so prodigal, that land is still abundant. Therefore, only the most productive pieces of land are utilized. There is land which people consider--either with regard to its physical productivity or with regard to its location--as too poor to be worth cultivating.

The employment of land for the location of human residences, workshops, and means of transportation withdraws pieces of soil from other employments.

In the imaginary construction of the evenly rotating economy buying and selling of the services of definite pieces of land does not differ at all from buying and selling the services of other factors of production. All these factors are appraised according to the services they will render in various periods of the future, due allowance being made for time preference. For the marginal land (and, of course, for the submarginal land) no price is paid at all.

Labor is a factor of production. The price which the seller of labor can obtain on the market depends on the data of the market.

Wages are the prices paid for the factor of production, human labor. As is the case with all the other prices of complementary factors of production their height is ultimately determined by the prices of the products as they are expected at the instant the labor is sold and bought. It does not matter whether he who performs the labor sells his services to an employer who combines them with the material factors production and with the services of other people or whether he himself embarks upon his own account and peril upon these acts of combination.

The fundamental facts affecting the supply of labor are:

1. Every individual can expend only a limited quantity of labor.

2. This definite quantity cannot be performed at any time desired. The interpolation of periods of rest and recreation is indispensable.

3. Not every individual is able to perform any kind of labor. There are innate as well as acquired diversities in the abilities to perform certain types of work. The innate faculties required for certain types of work cannot be acquired by any training and schooling.