Sometimes price is affected by the agreements of the purchaser or seller, but most readily by those of middlemen between consumer and producer.(670) Customs peculiar to whole classes may exert the same influence, and such customs are especially powerful in the lower stages of business and industrial development. They, even at the present time, take the place, frequently, of freedom of competition in retail business, in the book business, and in the determination of lawyers’ and doctors’ fees, as well as in the distribution of a nation’s income among the three great branches of its general economy,(671) deciding, instead of competition, how much shall go to each. Wherever there are guilds, communities, castes etc. with legal privileges; wherever there are difficulties placed in the way of exportation and importation; wherever preëmption rights or monopolies,(672) in the strict sense of the word, exist, the leveling ebb and flow of the elements of production may be still more seriously interfered with. Legislation(673) of this sort injures the non-privileged portion of the population more than it helps the privileged portion. (See § 97.)(674) The word _usury_, so arbitrarily used in every-day language, should be admitted in science only to designate a famine-price, fraudulently and intentionally caused or intensified. Section CXIV. Prices Fixed By Government. No power can, of course, fix the price of a commodity in the long run, which cannot at the same time fix the relation of supply and demand. Hence, set prices fixed by governmental authority can be made to play a part in practice only in so far as they do not establish a price in opposition to the real state of things, only to the extent that they give undoubted expression to it in a manner in harmony with natural conditions. With this restriction, set or fixed prices may, in the absence of real competition, which can always best determine prices, be useful to both parties; otherwise one party would at one time, and the other at another, profit by an unjust advantage; but it would not be long before both would suffer from the perturbation caused thereby in all commercial transactions. How pleasant it is for a traveler in Switzerland, or even in Italy, to find set prices established there.(675) Especially where competition is prevented by state privileges, the establishment of set prices by the state for the protection of the public may be necessary.(676) It is more difficult to fix a set price for a commodity in proportion to its complexity and to its variableness in quality; and where there are different grades of quality of the same commodity, and the transition from one grade to another is almost imperceptible, such price is easily evaded.(677) In the case of every enterprise carried on by many in common, where no competition is possible, it is necessary to supply the defect by means similar to the establishment of fixed prices; as in the