Ske. 5] INCOME 109

how durable the instrument; it is always double counting
to include the instrument and its uses. The savings may
be invested in land or in confectionery. The only true
income is the use of the land or the use of the confectionery.
 To include also the value of the land or the
value of the confectionery is to count asincome the capitalization
 of income.

§ 5

Economists have been more or less aware of the pitfall
of double counting, but not of the reason for it. They
have therefore attempted to avoid it, not by excluding all
commodities from the income concept and restricting it to
services, but by specifically excluding from income certain
groups of commodities. Naturally, they have been at
a loss to formulate a satisfactory and logical principle for
this exclusion. Some of them have no better suggestion to
offer than that all “large” or “unusual” acquisitions should
be ruled out, and that only those commodities which come
into a man’s possession in a “regular” stream shall be entitled
 to the name income. This makeshift has received
much currency among German writers. To be sure, it
serves the purpose of excluding from income such obviously
 inappropriate elements as bequests and gifts of large
fortunes. It is clear that when a well-known millionaire
recently fell heir to seventy millions, this did not constitute
 his income for the year in which he received it, but
that it merely constituted the principal or capital from
which he would receive income in subsequent years. But
the reason that it is improper to call this suddenly acquired
fortune income is not that it was large, nor that it was
sudden, but that it consisted of rights to concrete wealth
— factories, ships, railways, and dwellings. These things
are not under any circumstances income, but yield income
through future uses. It is idle to call income “regular”;
for we all know that it is irregular.