The evil effects to the consumer are more manifest in some trades than in others, as, for instance, in the liquor trade. Here we have human beings producing what they know people will buy; and then, not content with the existing demand, using all possible means to excite and maintain a further demand—simply that they may make money. Again, in our degraded press, we have a most conspicuous instance of this prostitution of a great social function to private ends. Under the mistaken idea that the distribution of news is a process for feeding owners of papers, and thus being led to arrange their news so as to please the most buyers, they rapidly descend along lines of least resistance to a wholesale catering to the worst tastes of the most people; and supplement that by elaborate efforts to foment and spread the low appetites they so obsequiously serve. Naturally there is no growth and grandeur in a trade like this. To spread knowledge, sympathy, instant information of the world’s movements good and bad, is to take part in one of society’s chief functions; in the general nervous system of the world. But to ascertain that society enjoys certain sensations, and to force the general presentation of news into a special arrangement to give those desired sensations, is to turn healthy action into a loathsome disease. In any form of human production, the object is to serve the consumer by the best development of the product, _not_ to use the consumer as a means of profit for the producer. The producer must, of course, be provided for; as must the soldier, artist, physician; but self-interest is not the object of the work. In the production of shoes, again, the object should be a constant improvement in material, shape, wearing quality, and general utility and beauty. Deliberately to change the shape and size, the proportion and make of human footwear, merely to cater to low tastes, is the degrading “pot-boiler”; the prostituting of a social function to a private end. All forms of cheap and dishonest production, of adulteration, of an artificially forced market, are directly traceable to our Want theory; to our persistent superstition which still crudely imagines this vast and intricate world of interservice to be a primeval forest, where beast and savage hunt for prey. The mistake in object degrades the product, and the degraded product degrades the man. Thus our immense field of production is not only checked in output and arrested in distribution, but weakened through and through by adulteration and bad workmanship; with evils in result, unending. The natural trend toward a wider, fuller, easier, and ever better production, accompanied at every step by growing pride and power and pleasure in the producer, is hindered and perverted to large degree by our prevalent economic fallacies.