interest, return to him a golden harvest. A religious value may flow into the economic value of religious books. A moral or religious value may be transformed into a law. A legal value--as a franchise right[180]--has often a definitely recognized economic value as well. Economic value, spent in an educational campaign, may result in the establishment of a new moral or legal value. And so on indefinitely. Enough has been said to show that there is some sort of analogy between social and physical forces, in that both can be transformed into other forms of force. The analogy might be pushed further. It is often difficult to make the transformation in both cases--there's lots of "friction" if a man starts out publicly and brazenly to buy a political office, and a great deal of waste in the process. But enough has also been said to show the weakness of such an analogy: in creating personal prestige through the wise use of his political power, an officer may actually increase, instead of exhausting, his political power. Or, in the moment of attempting certain transformations, the original power may be suddenly wiped out--as if a great political leader should undertake to popularize some form of immorality. There is no law of equivalence, of conservation of energy, in social forces. Their nature and their relations are organic, and not mechanical. Or, we may speak of equilibria among social forces. Economists have for a long time been used to this, speaking of equilibria between supply and demand, between labor and capital, between enterprise and the other factors of production, between intensive and extensive margins, etc. But we may also have equilibria between, say, demand and moral values, as when moral forces oppose the consumption of liquor, or between supply and law, as in the case where regulation, rather than total suppression, of certain vicious businesses is the practice, or where the effort at total suppression falls short. And equilibria between enterprise and law and morals are being constantly worked out--entrepreneurs seeking to produce at the minimum expense, even at the cost of the lives and health of their employees, and law and morals[181] drawing limits beyond which they must not go, with a struggle between them at the margin--and the money prices of the products reflect the marginal equilibrium attained. Supply may be in equilibrium with a protective tariff, or an internal revenue excise--legal values which the economists have long been accustomed to treat quantitatively by the laws of incidence, and whose strength they measure in terms of money prices.[182] Not "utility and cost," but an infinite complex of social forces are in equilibrium in the economic situation.