Under the market price or supply-and-demand price system as it has prevailed, the constant tendency is for the wealthier people, both among farmers and among business men, to increase their wealth at the expense of the poorer people. Poor people who embark in general business or in farming, no matter how intelligent, are likely to go into and come out of any particular enterprise at just the wrong time. The average man who is moderately well fixed and stays by a particular enterprise year in and year out, manages to secure for himself just a little better than ordinary wages. The man who is wealthy and expands his operations just as prices are starting up, and reduces operations just as prices are starting down, secures large profits. The fluctuating price system, which means great profits to a wealthy few, serious losses and wrecked lives for a few, and a bare livelihood for many, is the natural result of the _laissez faire_ policy of the old classical economists. Their idea was to let things alone, on the theory that, let alone, prices would sooner or later adjust themselves to the proper point. In practice, prices almost never reach a proper point, but are constantly moving either above or below cost of production. One hundred years of _laissez faire_ policy have demonstrated beyond a doubt that under such a system the wealthy few inevitably become richer, whereas the bulk of the people get just enough to keep them going. The _laissez faire_, supply and demand, speculative, or market price system, is condemned by nearly every one except the business men who run it and believe they understand its beneficent workings, and the economists of the classical type who, in their careful reasoning, are unable to think of any other way of determining satisfactory prices over any period of time. The common people and the lofty idealists were greatly elated during 1917 and 1918 at the apparently successful working of fixed prices established more or less in defiance of the speculative or _laissez faire_ price system.