UNLESS selling prices indemnify producers' costs, the goods
will not get produced. This is, however, a generalization hav-
ing rightly to do only with money costs, because it has to do only
with money receipts. The reference is to costs from the point
of view of the enterpriser-employer. It holds also that if his outlays
do not afford a sufficient inducement to the payees, the individuals
in the employee relation, for turning over to his control the agents
of production, he must fail of attaining this control. And with the
analysis pushed further stages back; if these payees in turn have to
submit to money costs in providing productive agents, his payments
to them must indemnify them for their costs of production, else the
productive agents must ultimately cease to be forthcoming. The
outlays of each employer are in turn the receipts of his employee-
producers. This is not a recondite truth; what you collect from me
I pay to you.

It is clear, then, that this regress method of accounting for some
of the enterpriser's costs is a possible way. And if somewhere in
the regress line, these money costs resolve into something else than
money costs, and something explanatory of them, a most significant
step will have been achieved. There is in this aspect, however,
nothing significant in any regress from one purely money cost to
another.

But no enterpriser's selling price needs at any particular time to
indemnify the enterpriser for more than the immediate charges that
the situation of the immediate time imposes on him. The outlay by
him necessary at the time for control of any particular factor is its
cost to him. It need not be an indemnity adequate to the covering
of all the costs attaching to the factor in the regress aspect, but only
enough to overcome the resistance at that time to his control of it

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