But if they contemplate an exchange of products with a view to satisfying mutual needs, this exchange must be effected in accordance with a system of economy which is indifferent to considerations of talent and genius, and whose laws are deduced, not from vague and meaningless admiration, but from a just balance between DEBIT and CREDIT; in short, from commercial accounts.
Now, that no one may imagine that the liberty of buying and selling is the sole basis of the equality of wages, and that society's sole protection against superiority of talent lies in a certain force of inertia which has nothing in common with right, I shall proceed to explain why all capacities are entitled to the same reward, and why a corresponding difference in wages would be an injustice.

I shall prove that the obligation to stoop to the social level is inherent in talent; and on this very superiority of genius I will found the equality of fortunes.

I have just given the negative argument in favor of rewarding all capacities alike; I will now give the direct and positive argument.
Listen, first, to the economist: it is always pleasant to see how he reasons, and how he understands justice.

Without him, moreover, without his amusing blunders and his wonderful arguments, we should learn nothing.

Equality, so odious to the economist, owes every thing to political economy.
"When the parents of a physician [the text says a lawyer, which is not so good an example] have expended on his education forty thousand francs, this sum may be regarded as so much capital invested in his head.