Steiner's price law: whoever steps out of the division of labour to supply himself must enter his own product in the balance sheet above the market price.
Self-Provision Under the Division of Labour in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the case where a producer inside a divided economy makes something for his own use rather than buying it, and for the price law that follows. Steiner set it out in the Political Economy Seminar (GA 341), in the third seminar discussion held at Dornach on 2 August 1922, using the tailor who sews his own suit. Because the division of labour is itself a fructification of labour, it cheapens every product; stepping back out of it reverses the cheapening, so the self-made suit has to be entered in the tailor's balance sheet above the market price, not below it. The single quota is too small for the tailor to feel, and that smallness is where the deception lies. Modern application: the rule reappears wherever household production is priced at forgone earnings rather than at nothing.
Self-provision under the division of labour is what happens when someone who works inside a specialised economy steps outside it to make what he needs. Steiner treated this as an accounting question before a moral one. The tailor who sews his own suit has not saved money; he has taken one suit out of the trader's stock, raised the profit the trader must take on the rest, and pressed prices down among tailors.
In Steiner's Own Words
With a more extensive division of labor, no one will prepare anything for themselves anymore, except in agriculture. If a tailor actually makes his own suit and he wants to draw up a completely correct balance sheet for himself, then he would simply have to include his own suit in this balance sheet at a higher price than the market price. So he has to set his expenses higher than the market price. It does not matter so much whether he actually buys the suit or not.
What it Means Today
Academic economics reached Steiner's accounting move forty-three years later, from a different direction. Gary Becker's paper "A Theory of the Allocation of Time," published in The Economic Journal in September 1965, argued that households are producers as well as consumers, and that the hours poured into home-produced goods carry a real price: the earnings given up by not working in the market. Becker's full price of a home-cooked meal or a self-sewn suit is therefore higher than the receipts suggest, which is the entry Steiner told the tailor to make in his balance sheet in 1922. That method became standard, and it underwrites the opportunity-cost valuations statistical offices now use in satellite accounts for unpaid household work, which the core national accounts still leave outside the production boundary.
Thalira synthesis: the two men price the same act differently, and the difference is the whole point. Becker prices it against the individual's forgone wage, asking what this person lost. Steiner prices it against the association, asking what the shared circuit lost when one suit was pulled out of it, since the division of labour is a fructification of labour that no single producer owns. Self-provision is therefore not thrift misread as a rounding error, it is a withdrawal of shared fructification that an individual balance sheet is structurally unable to display, which is why Steiner named the smallness of the quota a deception rather than a saving. Anyone costing their own labour honestly, from a smallholder weighing a home crop to a freelancer doing their own bookkeeping, is working inside that distinction.
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