Competition; Monopolies -- United States; Trusts, Industrial
We have shown now the extent to which the congestion of wealth has gone.
We have shown that other men are poorer that these men may be richer. We
have explained that these great fortunes have been made, not by
legitimate enterprise, but largely by "lucky gambling." And finally we
have seen how the transfer of each enterprise to the control of stock
speculators adds it eventually to some already overgrown fortune. The
connection with the subject of the present volume is obvious. The
cotton-seed oil mills of the South, once held by private owners, are now
in the hands of a trust whose certificates are quoted on the
stock-exchanges, and are held only by men of large capital, or by stock
gamblers. This is a typical example of the change which is everywhere
occurring. Private enterprise gives way to the stock company, and that
in turn gives way to the trust. The salient fact, then, we may express
in similar terms to those of our first law of competition, as follows:
_The congestion of wealth tends to increase inversely with the number of
competing units._
The facts we have stated make it impossible for the greater monopolies
to defend themselves, on the ground that their profits inure to the
benefit of any great number of people. But this is not an innocuous
state of affairs. It is one of serious injustice and evil. The workman
who struggles hard to save a hundred dollars a year can receive only a
paltry three dollars and a half of interest or less, if he deposits it
in a saving-bank. But the capitalist who is clearing a hundred thousand
a year may make twice or thrice that interest from his investments. In
short, the charge is: That monopoly and intense competition, with the
variation in price which they cause, have shut out the small capitalists
of the country from the ownership of the most profitable sorts of
property; and by confining them to other lines, have decreased their
possible income from their investments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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