Business practices which inhibit industrial efficiency and curtail the industrial output are too well known to need particular enumeration. Nor is it necessary to cite evidence to show that such inhibition and curtailment are resorted to from motives of pecuniary expediency. But an illustrative example or two will make the theoretical point clearer, and perhaps more plainly bring out the wholly pecuniary grounds of such business procedure. The most comprehensive principle involved in this class of business management is that of raising prices, and so increasing the net gains of business, by limiting the supply, or "charging what the traffic will bear." Of a similar effect, for the point here in question, are the obstructive tactics designed to hinder the full efficiency of a business rival. These phenomena lie along the line of division between tangible and intangible assets. Successful strategy of this kind may, by force of custom, legislation, or the "freezing-out" of rival concerns, pass into settled conditions of differential advantage for the given business concern, which so may be capitalised as an item of intangible assets and take their place in the business community as articles of invested wealth. But, aside from such capitalisation of inefficiency, it is at least an equally consequential fact that the processes of productive industry are governed in detail by the exigencies of investment, and therefore by the quest of gain as counted in terms of price, which leads to the dependence of production on the course of prices. So that, under the regime of capital, the community is unable to turn its knowledge of ways and means to account for a livelihood except at such seasons and in so far as the course of prices affords a differential advantage to the owners of the material equipment. The question of advantageous--which commonly means rising--prices for the owners (managers) of the capital goods is made to decide the question of livelihood for the rest of the community. The recurrence of hard times, unemployment, and the rest of that familiar range of phenomena, goes to show how effectual is the inhibition of industry exercised by the ownership of capital under the price system.[3]