Roy A. Foulke in a Study of the Concept of National Income, printed in 1952 by Dun and Bradstreet, incorrectly argued, I believe, that services should not be included in national income. He said "services are not needed to live and those who provide services ... obtain in exchange for services the wealth by which they live." He also stated that the national income should be measured by the production of wealth and on the other side of the ledger would be imputed rent to land, wages to labor, and interest to capital.

Services are needed to live! The services of doctors, nurses, dentists and teachers are necessities, so are the services of the transportation of persons -- busses, airlines, trains; so are the services of lodging, hotels, motels, rented homes; and so are the services of rented land for camping sites. None of these services produce wealth but they do exist along with thousands more. Services do enter and pass through the free market place.

The Statistical Abstract of the United States puts services as 39.7 percent of the gross national product. We Georgists know this is incorrect because of sloppy definitions. We should also face the fact that we may be wrong in calling services zero percent. We may have sloppy definitions too!

Take our definition of labor -- "all human exertion in the production of wealth." What do you call the toil of the doctor, nurse, passenger pilot, teacher? It is labor, of course, and the return for this toil did not add to the price of any article of wealth.

Our definition is unilateral, not bilateral, as we unconsciously assume. Not all labor is in the production of wealth -- only some of it. Our definition of labor should be: "all human exertion in the production of wealth and in the performance of services."

Similarly we should redefine wealth: "all material things produced by human labor for the satisfaction of human desires, having exchange value," as "all things produced by humans having exchange value."

In our old definition both "material" and "for the satisfaction of human desires" are superfluous. "Labor" should come out of the definition of wealth so that things produced by the human body and voluntarily sold can be classified as wealth, such as blood, human hair, mother's milk and eventually human organs.

This change would make the definition of wealth inclusive.

Services are not things, they should not be defined as the purchased uses of labor and/or capital, and/or land sites outside of the production of wealth.

It would be superfluous but perhaps clarifying to add "for the satisfaction of human desires, and upon completion, without exchange value." We could also add "services do not contain any extracted land, but may use the sites of land in their performance."

Services can be described by what they serve, and the examples are in the yellow pages of the telephone directories. Services are performed on humans without adding exchange value, by doctors, nurses, teachers, advisors, bus drivers, and hairdressers.

Services are performed for humans without adding exchange value, through entertainment, as plays, movies, TV, spectator games, swimming pools, pool halls, use of land sites (without depletion) and capital, but little labor, or in renting equipment such as chain saws, rug cleaning machines, etc.

Services are performed on articles of wealth without adding exchange value on clothes by dry cleaning and laundry, and on homes by house cleaning.

Services are performed on non-wealth things in such operations as refuse removal, house wrecking, etc.

The beauty of these corrected definitions and the added one of services, is that we can still operate within the Georgist philosophy and logic. The distribution of values in wealth or the value in the performance of service still go in the same channels -- wages to labor, interest to capital and rent to land.

Let's run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it.