Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/65

Rh monopoly. A theory of price is needed which preserves the economic value of combination; and, at the same time, removes the evil features of special privileges and of monopoly.

A fair wage is as yet a very elusive and indefinite concept. A fair wage for an unskilled worker would not be a fair wage for the skilled man. The needs of the man are, in the last analysis, the chief factors in determining fair wages. Subjective, rather than objective, considerations have the greatest weight in the eye of modern man. Here is a point of contrast between the modern and the medieval view point. Again, social considerations enter into the problem. How will the man make use of his income? Society desires that a large income go to the man who will make the best use of it—the use which will tend to advance the progress of humanity. A multitude of different opinions will be expressed as to the best uses of income; but certain fundamental conditions are almost universally accepted. Excessive luxury and wasteful consumption in living, in eating, in drinking and the like, are condemned at the bar of society. In general, it is for the good of society that expenditures for luxuries be sent for durable goods rather than upon highly perishable commodities. A fair price for all articles and services would tend to place wealth and income in the hands of those best fitted to handle it; those who would make the best use of it judged from the somewhat theoretical view-point of society as a whole, but not from the standpoint of any special class in the community. A fair wage in an ideal industrial organism would give to each according to his needs; and needs would be proportional to efficiency.

Distribution must now be considered from a non-competitive point of view; and the storm center of discussion will be found in the treatment of rents or monopoly gains. Wages are individual products; but interest and rents must be held to be social, or at least semi-social, products. Social evolution has, it is true, made possible the existing rates of wages; but a sharp line of demarkation may be drawn between wages on the one side, and rent and interest on the other. Individual traits and characteristics play an important part in fixing wages. On the contrary, rents accrue because of social progress, not because of individual efficiency. The man who invests capital is frequently able to gain a personally unearned income, to draw dividends, for example, upon watered stocks. But the man who furnishes his labor receives no extra or special gain. He runs no risk; but in a multitude of cases, the returns accruing to the capitalist or the promoter bear no discernible relation to the risk involved. Individuals are able magically to make capital—paper capital, but of a kind that bears interest. Labor is unable by any sleight-of-hand performance to double or treble "its equipment. A dollar may through stock watering, aided by gifts of franchises and rights of way or by special privileges, be apparently changed into two dollars and draw the income of two; but the laborer in the same business can not make it appear that he has four hands or