own or control any appreciable proportion of the material equipment or of the natural resources to which this technological knowledge and skill applies and in the use of which it takes effect. (_h_) It results that the owners of this large material equipment, including the natural resources, have a discretionary control of the technological proficiency of the community at large, as well as of those special lines of insight and skill that are vested in these specially trained expert men in whom a specialised proficiency is added to the general proficiency that is diffused through the community at large. (_i_) In effect, therefore, the owners of the necessary material equipment own also the working capacity of the community and the usufruct of the state of the industrial arts. Except for their effective ownership of these elements of productive efficiency their ownership of the material equipment of industry would be of no effect. But the usufruct of this productive capacity of the community and its trained workmen vests in the owners of the material equipment only with the contingent qualification that if the community does this work it must be allowed a livelihood, whereby the gross returns that go in the first instance to these owners suffer abatement by that much. This required livelihood is adjusted to a conventional standard of living which, under the current circumstances of pecuniary emulation, is in great part--perhaps chiefly--a standardised schedule of conspicuous waste.