Robert A. Heinlein

Zim said earnestly, "I wish to heaven there were some way for me to take that flogging myself, sir."

"You'd have to take your turn, I outrank you. What do you think I've been wishing the past hour? What do you think I was afraid of from the moment I saw you come in here sporting a shiner? I did my best to brush it off with administrative punishment and the young fool wouldn't let well enough alone. But I never thought he would be crazy enough to blurt out that he had hung one on you -- he's stupid; you should have eased him out of the outfit weeks ago... instead of nursing him along until he got into trouble. But blurt it out he did, to me, in front of witnesses, forcing me to take of official notice of it—and that licked us. No way to get it off the record, no way to avoid a court... just go through the whole dreary mess and take our medicine, and wind up with one more civilian who'll be against us the rest of his days. Because he has to be flogged; neither you nor I can take it for him, even though the fault was ours. Because the regiment has to see what happens when nine-oh-eight-oh is violated. Our fault... but his lumps."

He had been droning along about "value," comparing the Marxist theory with the orthodox "use" theory. Mr. Dubois had said, "Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.

"These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value— the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives— and to illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use."

Dubois had waved his stump at us. "Nevertheless—wake up, back there! nevertheless the disheveled old mystic of Das Kapital, turgid, tortured, confused, and neurotic, unscientific, illogical, this pompous fraud Karl Marx, nevertheless had a glimmering of a very important truth. If he had possessed an analytical mind, he might have formulated the first adequate definition of value... and this planet might have been saved endless grief.

"If you can't listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether ‘value' is a relative, or an absolute?"

I had been listening; I just didn't see any reason not to listen with eyes closed and spine relaxed. But his question caught me out; I hadn't read that day's assignment. "An absolute," I answered, guessing.

"Wrong," he said coldly. " ‘Value' has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human -- ‘market value' is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible." (I had wondered what Father would have said if he had heard "market value" called a "fiction" -- snort in disgust, probably.)

"This very personal relationship, ‘value,' has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him... and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts that ‘the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted... and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

"Nothing of value is free.

I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money—which is true—just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion... and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value."