Section L.. The Same Subject Continued.

The Same Subject Continued.

Even Adam Smith called services, in the narrower sense of the term (§ 3), the grave and important ones of the statesman, clergyman and physician, as well as the “frivolous” ones of the opera singer, ballet-dancer and buffoon, unproductive. The labor of none of these can be fixed or incorporated in any particular object.(322)(323) But how strange it is that the labor of a violin-maker is called productive, while that of the violin-player is called unproductive; although the product of the former has no other object than to be played on by the latter? (Garnier.) Is it not strange that the hog-raiser should be called productive, and the educator of man unproductive (List); the apothecary, who prepares a salve which alleviates for the moment, productive, the physician, unproductive, spite of the fact that his prescription in relation to diet, or his surgical operation, may radically cure the severest disease?

If the productiveness of an employment of the factors of production be made to depend on whether it is attended by a material result, no one will deny that the labor of the plowman, for instance, is productive; and no one, of Adam Smith’s school, at least, that that of the clerk, who orders the raw material for the owner of the manufactory, is. They have participated indirectly in the production. But, has not the servant of the state, who protects the property of its citizens, or the physician, who preserves the health of the producer, an equally mediate but indispensable share in it? The field-guard who keeps the crows away, every one calls productive; why, not, then, the soldier, who keeps away a far worse enemy from the whole land? (McCulloch.) But the entire division of business into two branches, the one directly, and the other indirectly productive, can be defended only as respects certain kinds of goods. (Schmitthenner.) The labor of the judge, for instance, is only indirectly productive in the manufacture of shoes, inasmuch as he guarantees the payment of the shoemaker’s account. On the other hand, the shoemaker contributes only very indirectly to the general security which the law affords, by protecting the judge’s foot.(324)

Nor can any effectual inferiority of service be claimed, simply because the productive power of one branch of business is, measured by the duration of its results, greater than another.(325) What is more perishable than a loaf of bread bought for dinner? What more imperishable than the monumentum ære perennius of a Horace? The labor expended on persons and on relations (Verhältnissen) is, both as to the extent and duration of its results, much less capable of being estimated than any other; but its capacity of accumulation and its power of propagation are greater than any other. It is in the domain of the “immaterial,” that man is most “creative.” (Lueder.)(326) Finally, neither should the greater indispensableness of the more material branches of business be too generally asserted. Agriculture produces grain which is indispensable, and tobacco which is not; industry, cloth, as well as lace; commerce draws from the same part of the world rhubarb and edible bird’s-nests; and so, to services belong the indispensable ones of the educator and judge, as well as those of the rope-dancer and bear-leader, which can be dispensed with.(327) Indeed, the dividing line between material and intellectual production cannot, by any means, be closely drawn.(328)