For example, a lighthouse reminds us of a harbor, which is equally necessary. Every ship coming into a harbor has to pay harbor dues; therefore anyone making a harbor can make money by it. But great harbors, with their breakwaters and piers built up in the sea, take so many years to construct, and the work is so liable to damage and even destruction in storms, and the impossibility of raising harbor dues beyond a certain point without sending the ships round to cheaper harbors so certain, that private capital turns away from it to enterprises in which there is more certainty as to what the cost will be, less delay, and more money to be made. For instance, distilleries make large profits. There is no uncertainty about the cost of building them and fitting them up; and a ready sale for whiskey can always be depended on. You can tell to within a few hundred pounds what a big distillery will cost, whereas you cannot tell to within a million what a big harbor will cost. All this would not influence the Government, which has to consider only whether another distillery or another harbor is more wanted for the good of the nation. But the private capitalists have not the good of the nation in their charge: all they have to consider is their duty to themselves and their families, which is to choose the safest and most profitable way of investing their spare money. Accordingly they choose the distillery; and if we depended on private capitalists alone the country would have as many distilleries as the whiskey market could support, and no harbors. And when they have established their distillery they will spend enormous sums of money in advertisements to persuade the public that their whiskey is better and healthier and older and more famous than the whiskey made in other distilleries, and that everybody ought to drink whiskey every day as a matter of course. As none of these statements is true, the printing of them is, from the point of view of the nation, a waste of wealth, a perversion of labor, and a propaganda of pernicious humbug. The private capitalists not only choose what will make most money for them, but what will make it with least trouble: that is, they will do as little for it as possible. If they sell an article or a service, they will make it as dear as possible instead of as cheap as possible. This would not matter if, as thoughtless people imagine, the lower the price the bigger the sale, and the bigger the sale the greater the profit. It is true in many cases that the lower the price the bigger the sale; but it is not true that the bigger the sale the greater the profit. There may be half a dozen prices (and consequently sales) at which the profit will be exactly the same.