Johann Karl Rodbertus

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Johann Karl Rodbertus (1805-1875), also known as Karl Rodbertus-Jagetzow, was a German economist and socialist. He defended the labor theory of value (LTV) as well as the view, as an inference from that, that interest or profit is theft.

Rodbertus stated the LTV as three connected propositions. First, only those goods that result from labor may be thought to be economic goods – other goods, like sunlight, which do not result from labor are natural goods and consequently have nothing to do with economics. Second, an economic good is solely the product of the labor – any other view of it is to be left to physicists. No part of the value of grain, for example, is to be attributed to sunshine or soil. Third, economic goods are products of the labor that went into their composition and the labor that created the instruments that enabled that production. The value of grain, for example, is not to be found merely in the ploughman but also in the work of those who manufactured the plough.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk thought that Rodbertus' exposition of the exploitation theory was superior to that of Karl Marx in profundity and coherence. Nonetheless, he considered it fallacious, asking whether a nugget of gold that falls to earth embedded in a meteorite would fall outside the purview of economic science. Will someone effortlessly coming across that gold "protect it from the greed of others, prudently dispose of it on the market, in short, husband it with the same economy as he would in the case of gold and silver which he had acquired through the labor of his hands?"

See also History of Socialism