Popularity: 1
Vote:   | A laborer no longer makes whole articles. He receives raw materials, puts his touch on them, and passes them to another worker in the series. When the articles are quite finished they are carried out of sight by currents of commercial exchange. These currents are untraceable. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | A modern producer does not wish to keep the identical things that he makes; but he does want to keep the value that he brings into existence. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | A trust unites entrepreneurs in one industry; and it challenges a comparison between the gross profits that it secures for its members, and the earnings of labor and capital in other industries. Not far above the standard set by the social productivity of labor and capital can the gains of most trusts be permanently carried. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | As between a public policy that relies on natural forces, and one that trenches on the sphere of those forces, I am not merely advocating the former for voluntary adoption. Not for a moment will I admit that there is real uncertainty as to which policy will be pursued. It is not a matter to be decided by debate. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Between coercive and non-coercive arbitration runs the dividing line of which we have spoken. The one perverts natural law, and the other strengthens it. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | By reason of this objection on the legal side, the conclusive objection on the economic side is in danger of falling out of sight. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Dull would be the man who should merely tolerate this plan of social industry. Weak would be the position of him who should take an apologetic tone in defending it, or present its claims in a merely negative way, by exposing the evils and perils of the socialistic plan. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Everyone of intelligence knows that the dollar-sign on a share of stock is meaningless under present conditions, and that if he is at all guided by it, rather than by independent knowledge, in judging of the value of the property, he is to that extent misguided. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Experience alone can give a final answer. The knowledge gained in a few years by a commission of the kind suggested would be worth more than volumes of mere assertions and contradictions. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If a man were living in isolation his income would be literally his product. Make him the monarch and owner of an island, and the fruits that he raises and the clothing that he makes constitute, in themselves, his income. This ceases to be true when trading begins. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If one corporation owned every woolen mill in the world, while other industries were in the hands of separate and competing owners, the ratc of pay in the monopolized industry would conform to 'the final productivity of labor in the others. This inter-groupal equalization of earnings is the thing that it is of most importance to preserve. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If one industry were a complete monopoly it could not force wages below the rate fixed by the final productivity of labor in other industries. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If the adjustment made by a court can be accepted or not, it will be refused whenever the men can gain more by continuing the strike, with whatever of violence that involves. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If we see to it that wages conform to the final productivity of social labor, we should see to it that trusts do not lower that standard. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In a recent decision of the Supreme Court, not made, however, by the full court, and concurred in by only four justices, it was held that the seller of a patented mimeograph could bind the purchaser to use only his ink in the machine, though the ink was not patented. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It is a familiar fact that a wholesome fear of outside competition holds trusts in check. It sets a limit on their action in curtailing production and raising prices. Up to a limit this policy may be pursued; if it is carried farther new competitors appear and special profits are in danger of vanishing. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Not so clear, at first glance, is the case of entrepreneurs' unions termed trusts or monopolies. et it is already evident that competitive law works in spite of them. It is my belief that it may be made to work through them. That competition that is general in its scope may make use of trusts, as it does of laborers' unions. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Positive are the claims of that form of society that evolution has secured; yet it is by its possibilities of progress that it is mainly to be judged. Before all else is this system a dynamic one. Competition is a guaranty of a movement that will satisfy the demands of a healthy optimism. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Socialism appeals to better classes and has far more strength. Attack the state and you excite feelings of loyalty even among the disaffected classes; but attack the industrial system and appeal to the state, and you may have loyalty in your favor. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Strikes now rely, in part, on an unnatural influence. They terrorize non-unmon men. This often makes the adjustment of wages a prolonged tragedy, and is so obviously intolerable that not a word should here be wasted in demonstrating what, in this connection, is the duty of the state. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | That would scarcely be a government at all that should refuse to exert its power in protecting men in their right to work. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The decree of a coercive tribunal would not need to conform to the true standard of wages, the final productivity of social labor. It would introduce into distribution a genuinely arbitrary element, with a very large ultimate power to pervert the natural system. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The limit is not as narrow as it might be. I do not claim for this action, as it now goes on, an ideal degree of efficiency. What I do claim is that this type of competition already reveals its nature and its ultimate power to hold seeming monopolies in check. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The line of cleavage that separates the policy that is germane to the universally accepted purpose of the state from that which is contrary to it, is a delicate line; but it is clearly traceable. We shall follow it in connection with two critical issues that are now pending. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The market tends to pay as a wage what an individual laborer is worth. But the case last studied suggests the question how accurately the law operates in practice. May it not be an honest law, but be so vitiated in its working as to give a dishonest result? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The power of a trust for evil depends on some form of personal discrimination in commercial dealing. It depends on a power, lodged in some corporation, to treat customers unequally. If no corporation were able to give A better terms than it gives to B the trust would be deprived of the weapon that is really dangerous. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There is a pseudo-socialism that is, in appearance, startling, and there is a genuine socialism that looks harmless. The test of genuineness is in the motive and the end of the movement. Is it caused by a distrust of the natural law of distribution? Does it aim to change that law? If so it is truly socialistic. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There is no uncertainty as to the standard about which wages, as adjusted by strikes, must fluctuate. Everywhere they are fixed, not merely by local conditions, but by a reference to a social standard of productivity of labor. Inter-groupal competition is, under present conditions, a particularly efficient force. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We cannot afford to have any large section of the business world in doubt whether they have broken the laws or not, and we cannot let the laws become a dead letter through vagueness. In this view it is clear that an administrative commission can render invaluable service. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We do not defend the perversions of the natural economic system; but because they are perversions merely, we shall remove them and keep the system. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We have, therefore, advanced far on the way to the condition in which we may be secured against the evils of a half evolved system of trusts if we know what measure, difficult though it may be, would protect us from these injuries. Let us see what ought to be done. Let us be sure what will happen if we do it, and what will follow if we do not. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We may not have been able to prevent agreements, but we shall have robbed them of their power for oppression by securing the right of any man to enter any business whose profits may attract him, assured of a 'square deal,' and knowing that if he can give as good value as his rivals, he will be as well off as they are, regardless of size. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We noted, as the worst abuse connected with a genuine monopoly, a mislocating of labor, and a reduction of the social standard of its earnings. If a trust cannot greatly raise prices it cannot greatly mislocate labor. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | When we say that the persistence of competition is ensured by fate, we mean that individual freedom is so guaranteed. The one thing to which fate binds us is liberty. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When, in any business, it shall be found that, in spite of everything, competition dies, or that some of our industries are condemned to inefficiency, it will then be time to change our policy, to recognize monopoly in these cases as a necessary fact and to take the logical next step of regulating prices. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Where a competitor has secured a local trade, it can ruin him by flooding his market with goods sold below the cost of producing them. In the interim the trust can maintain itself from the returns that come from other localities. If the low prices had to be universal, the powerful corporation would ruin itself as rapidly as it would its rival. |