Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/52

 for capitalists in control, or are only open to certain orders of investors. Human labour cannot, it is notorious, have full knowledge of and free access to all sorts of work, from the work of research and invention, or of business control, to the various grades of mental and manual skilled and unskilled labour.

It was the nature of this unfreedom and inequality in the competitive conditions which led me in the later nineties into my early challenge of the equity of the distribution of incomes. I then set myself to examine the actual operations of the owners of supply and demand, as expressed in the bargaining that determined those market prices which are the main instruments for the distribution of incomes. From this examination there emerged two salient truths: first, that in many markets the volume of supply was restricted, naturally or artificially, so as to give to the sellers, as a body, a superior bargaining force for the sale of their goods, reflected in a higher price than was economically necessary to evoke their productive services. Secondly, the selling prices, even where “free bargaining” prevailed, were determined in accord with the relative importance to certain buyers or sellers of effecting a purchase or sale: these marginal buyers or sellers fixed the price at a point where it was just worth their while to buy or sell, the other buyers or sellers got from this price something more than would have been a sufficient