"Hurry!" said Frog.
"We will run and catch it."
"No!" shouted Toad.
"I cannot do that."
"Why not?" asked Frog.
"Because," wailed Toad,
"running after my list
is not one of the things
that I wrote
on my list of things to do!"

Nebuchadnezzar, the great king of Babylon, sat on his throne and worried. He had a great empire - but what if another country attacked him? He wasn't sure that his army could defend Babylon from invaders. And he was very worried about Persia, a country to the east of Babylon. The Persians were expanding their own country. Their army was strong. He had heard frightening stories about Persian soldiers!

"I know what I'll do," he thought to himself. "I will ask the king of Persia if I can marry his daughter. Then he will be my father-in-law, and he won't attack me!"

Nebuchadnezzar had never seen the daughter of the Persian king. But that didn't matter to him. He was willing to marry a stranger to keep Babylon safe. So he sent messages to the king of Persia, offering to marry the princess.

"If you can't listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether 'value' is a relative, or an absolute?"

I had been listening; I just didn't see any reason not to listen with eyes closed and spine relaxed. But his question caught me out; I hadn't read that day's assignment. "An absolute," I answered, guessing.

"Wrong," he said coldly. "'Value' has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human - 'market value' is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible." (I had wondered what Father would have said if he had heard "market value" called a "fiction" - snort in disgust, probably.)

"This very personal relationship, 'value,' has two factors for a human being: first, what can he do with a thing, its use to him...and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted...and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

"Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain." He had been still looking at me and added, "If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier...and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You! I've just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy?"