try. These are the errors of all economists who regard the conditions of bourgeois production as eternal categories. From the providential object of rent, which is, for M. Proudhon, the transformation of the cultivator into a responsible workman, he goes on to the equalitarian reward of rent.
Rent, as we have just seen, is constituted by the equal price of the products of lands of unequal fertility in such wise that a hectolitre of wheat which has cost 10 francs is sold for 20 francs if the cost of production rises, for an inferior soil, to 20 francs. So long as necessity compels the purchase of all the agricultural products put upon the market, the market price is determined by the highest cost of production. It is, therefore, this equalisation of price, resulting from competition and not from the different fertility of soils, which secures for the proprietor of the superior soil a rent of 10 francs for each hectolitre which his farmer sells.
Let us for a moment suppose that the price of the wheat is determined by the labor-time necessary to produce it, and that in consequence the hectolitre of wheat obtained from the superior soil would be sold at 10 francs, while that obtained from the inferior soil would cost 20. That admitted, the mean market price would be 15 francs; while, according to the law of competition, it is 20 francs. If the mean price was 15 francs there would be nothing for distribution, either equalitarian or other, as there would be no rent. Rent exists only in consequence of the fact that the hectolitre of wheat, which cost the producer 10 francs, is sold for 20 francs. M. Proudhon supposes the equality of the market price, with unequal cost of production, in order
