There is, further, a large field of business, employing much capital goods and many technological processes, whose profits come from products in which serviceability and disserviceability are mingled with waste in the most varying proportions. Such are the production of goods of fashion, disingenuous proprietary articles, sophisticated household supplies, newspapers and advertising enterprise. In the degree in which business of this class draws its profits from wasteful practices, spurious goods, illusions and delusions, skilled mendacity, and the like, the capital goods engaged must be said to owe their capitalisable value to a perverse use of the technological expedients employed. These wasteful or disserviceable uses of capital goods have been cited, not as implying that the technological proficiency embodied in these goods or brought into effect in their use, intrinsically has a disserviceable bearing, nor that investment in these things, and business enterprise in the management of them, need aim at disserviceability, but only to bring out certain minor points of theory, obvious but commonly overlooked: (_a_) technological proficiency is not of itself and intrinsically serviceable or disserviceable to mankind,--it is only a means of efficiency for good or ill; (_b_) the enterprising use of capital goods by their businesslike owner aims not at serviceability to the community, but only at serviceability to the owner; (_c_) under the price system--under the rule of pecuniary standards and management--circumstances make it advisable for the business man at times to mismanage the processes of industry, in the sense that it is expedient for his pecuniary gain to inhibit, curtail, or misdirect industry, and so turn the community's technological proficiency to the community's detriment. These somewhat commonplace points of theory are of no great weight in themselves, but they are of consequence for any theory of business or of life under the rules of the price system, and they have an immediate bearing here on the question of intangible assets. * * * * *