Note 196a-4 — Chapter V

Lassalle's socialistic attacks on Political Economy have been directed mainly against the undertaker's profit or reward. Compare the work "Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, der ökonom. Julian oder Kapital und Arbeit," 1863. By means of state credit, he would have this branch of income turned over to common labor. Dühring also, Kapital und Arbeit 90, declaims not so much against capital as against "the absolutism of undertakers." Schäffle D. Vierteljahrsschrift Nr. 106, II, 223, objects to this, that undertakers give value in exchange to unfinished products, a great service rendered even to the laboring class, who otherwise would have to resign the advantages of the division of labor.

The undertaker's profit is precisely the part of the great politico-economical tree from which further growth chiefly takes place. To artificially arrest it, therefore, would be to hasten the stationary state, and thus make general and greater the pressure on workmen and capitalists, which it is sought to remove locally. Hence Roesler, Grundsätze, 507 ff., very appropriately calls the undertaker's profit the premium paid by society to those who most effectually combat the "law of rent." The importance of a good undertaker may be clearly seen when a joint stock manufacturing company pays a dividend of from 20 to 30 per cent., while one close by, of the same kind, produces no profit whatever. But, at the same time, the socialistic hatred of this branch of income may be easily accounted for, in a time full of stock-jobbing, which last never produces except a pseudo-undertaker's profit.