Page "Labor theory of value" Paragraph 50

Benjamin Franklin in his 1729 essay entitled " A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency " is sometimes credited ( including by Karl Marx ) with originating the concept in its modern form.

However, the theory has been traced back to Treatise of Taxes, written in 1662 by Sir William Petty and to John Locke's notion, set out in the Second Treatise on Government ( 1689 ), that property derives from labor through the act of " mixing " one's labor with items in the common store of goods, though this has alternatively been seen as a labor theory of property.

Other writers ( including Joseph Schumpeter ) have traced back the concept even further to Ibn Khaldun, who in his Muqaddimah ( 1377 ), described labor as the source of value, necessary for all earnings and capital accumulation, obvious in the case of craft.

He argued that even if earning “ results from something other than a craft, the value of the resulting profit and acquired ( capital ) must ( also ) include the value of the labor by which it was obtained.

Without labor, it would not have been acquired .”