Friedman had found the ideological lure he was looking for because an individual’s human capital (including earnings and liabilities) can be owned by nobody else. More importantly, human capital theory provides the ultimate neoclassical retort to the Marxist slogan that workers should seize the means of production. If each person is already their own means of production, then the intractable conflict at the heart of the capitalist labour process must logically dissolve. As it turns out, according to Schultz, all workers are in fact consummate capitalists: ‘labourers have become capitalists not from the diffusion of the ownership of corporation stocks, as folk law would have it, but from the acquisition of knowledge and skill that have economic value’.