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 to insist on the necessity for paying for his services. Business men continually complain nowadays of the difficulty of finding men with initiative and readiness to take responsibility. Under any system this need to reward good management would have to be met, or the community which failed to meet it would very soon find that it had perpetrated a bad economy.

Whatever analysis one adopts in trying to arrive at all the factors which have to be put into an article of modern consumption, it is always impossible to avoid a certain amount of confusion, owing to the complications which make one item shade into another. Perhaps we shall get a clearer vision of the matter if we imagine what might have been possible under primitive conditions of production, with one single individual providing or undertaking all the four essentials that have been enumerated above, and also being himself the consumer of the product when turned out.

In other words, we have to go back to Robinson Crusoe, and though there are very sound objections to what is called Crusoe economics, it does seem to be possible to get some clearness in that way before the problem is complicated by a considerable number of people being involved in the difficult question