Chapter I: Section CXLIV: Receipts.--Income.--Produce

The idea covered by the word receipts (_Einnahme_) embraces all the new additions successively made to one's resources within a given period of time.[144-1] Income, on the other hand, embraces only such receipts as are the results of economic activity. (See §§ 2, 11.) Produce (_Ertrag_, _produit_) is income, but not from the point of view of the person or _subject_ engaged in a business of any kind, but from that of the business itself, or of the _object_ with which the business is concerned, and on which it, so to speak, acts.

Income is made up of products, the results of labor and of the employment and use of resources. These products, the producer may either consume himself or exchange against other products, to satisfy a more urgent want.[144-2] Hence, spite of the frequency with which we hear such expressions as these: "the laborer eats the bread of his employer;" "the capitalist lives by the sweat of the brow of labor;" or, again, a manufacturer or business man "lives from the income of his customers,"[144-3] they are entirely unwarranted. No man who manages his own affairs well, or those of a household, lives on the capital or income of another man; but every one lives on his own income, by the things he has himself produced; although with every further development of the division of labor, it becomes rarer that any one puts the finishing stroke to his own products, and can satisfy himself by their immediate consumption alone. Hence we should call nothing diverted or derived income except that which has been gratuitously obtained from another.[144-4]

[Footnote 144-1: Including of course, gifts, inheritances,
lottery prizes, etc.]

[Footnote 144-2: Thus the original income of the peasant
consists in his corn, of the miller in his flour, of the
baker in his bread, of the shoemaker in his shoes. The money
which circulates among all these and the purchaser, is only
the means of exchanging that part of their products which
they cannot themselves use, for other goods. Money, on the
other hand, was the original income of the producers of the
gold or silver it contains. Compare _Mirabeau_, Philosophie
rurale, 1763, ch. 3. _Adam Smith_, II, ch. 2. But
especially, see _J. B. Say_, Traité II, ch. 1, 5; and
_Sismondi_, N. P., I, 90, 376, in which it is correctly
said, that the quality which constitutes anything capital or
income does not inhere in the thing itself, but depends on
the person. Compare, however, I, 148; _Hermann_, Staatsw.
Untersuch. 297 ff., 33 seq.]

[Footnote 144-3: A fundamental thought in _St. Chamans_, Du
Système d'Impôt, 1820. Nouvel Essai sur la Richesse des
Nations, 1824.]

[Footnote 144-4: Thus, for instance, the support given by
the head of a family to the members thereof; also gifts,
alms, thefts. Even _A. L. Schlözer_, St. A., II, 487, will
allow that no one "eats the bread of another," but the
person who has received it from the latter by way of favor
and for nothing. In the case of a rented house, there is
only an exchange of objects of income. The person to whom it
is rented gives up a portion of his, and the renting party
the use of his house. Similarly, in the case of personal
services. Writers who maintain that only certain kinds of
useful labor are productive, must of course extend the
limits of diverted income much farther. See _Lotz_,
Handbuch, III, § 133; _Rau_, Lehrbuch, I, §§ 248, 251.
_Cantillon_ thinks that if no landowner spent more than his
income, it would be scarcely possible for any one else to
grow rich. (Nature du Commerce, 75.) According to _Stein_,
Lehrbuch, 347, every one gets his income from the income of
other people!]