Price -- By Way of Litigation

Abstract

It ought to be obvious that value is the most relative of things. For value is worth and worth is what men make it. It has not always been so. A primitive people may make value a substance and hold it unchanging against all that comes to pass. Amid the slow tempo of the Middle Ages value came to inhere in a good and kept its pristine purity so long as its abode escaped physical harm. In an utopia-whether of the good old times or of things vainly hoped for-value is value and in its static verity stands foresquare against all the winds that blow. In the mind of the reasonable man, in a prevailing commonsense; in many a speculative system there is a fundamental oughtness about what a thing will fetch. Today a large domain of action takes its way as if value were a verity fashioned from an absolute that can be captured for everyday duty. Its reiterated appearance, clothed in the rhetoric of "intrinsic", "fair", and "right", attest the eternal essence which men have comfortably found in a concept whose emergent origin they ignore.