The Labor Theory of Value
“ It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good wife, must be in want of a job.” That, of course, is the famous opening line from fictional author Gianny Austin’s apocryphal novel, Property and Prejudice , a comedy of manners in which ownership of the means of production (except for an economic or political élite ) is depicted as being not quite polite, and the characters spend all their time cleverly positioning themselves for higher wages and fixed benefits, and then wondering why prices are so high and why other people keep telling them what to do.