If it arises from the nature of things, we shall see a very small amount of labour give rise to great value, and no one have reason to complain. Such is the case of the man who finds a diamond. Such is the case of Rubini, of Malibran, of Taglioni, of a fashionable tailor, of the proprietor of the Clos-Vougeot, etc., etc. Circumstances have put them in possession of rare means of rendering service; they have no rivals, and exact a high price. The service being, from its very nature, of excessive rarity, shows that it is not essential to the well-being and progress of mankind. It is an object of luxury, of vanity, which wealthy people are enabled to procure. Is it not natural that a man, before indulging in such satisfactions, should wait until he finds himself in a situation to provide for wants which are more imperious and more reasonable?
If competition is absent in consequence of some human intervention, the same effects are produced, but with this enormous difference, that they have been produced where they ought not. In that case we see a comparatively small amount of labour give rise to great value; but how? By forcibly interdicting that competition the effect of which is to proportion remuneration to services. Then, just as Rubini might say to a dilettante. “You must pay me handsomely, or I don’t sing this evening,”—presuming on being able to render a service which no one else can render,—in the same way a butcher, a baker, a landlord, a banker, may say, “I must have an extravagant price, or you shall have none of my corn, my bread, my meat, my gold; and I have adopted precautions, I shall employ force, to prevent you being able to provide yourself elsewhere, and to make sure that no one shall render you services analogous to mine.”
People who assimilate artificial to what they call natural monopolies, because they have this in common, that they enhance the value of labour, such people, I say, are both blind and superficial.
Artificial monopoly is nothing else than spoliation. It produces evils which, apart from it, did not exist. It inflicts privations on a considerable portion of society, frequently as regards commodities of primary necessity. Moreover, it gives rise to irritation, hatreds, reprisals,—all the fruits of injustice.
Natural advantages do no harm to mankind. At most we can say that they merely exhibit pre-existent evils, imputable to no one. It may be regretted, perhaps, that tokay is not as cheap and as abundant as vin ordinaire. But that is not a social evil; it is one imposed on us by nature.
Between natural and artificial monopolies, then, there is this essential difference:
The one is the effect of scarcity, pre-existent and inevitable.
The other is the effect of a scarcity which is factitious and unnatural.
In the first case, it is not the absence of competition which creates the scarcity; it is the scarcity which explains the absence of competition. Society would be puerile were it to complain and torment itself because there is in the world only one Jenny Lind, one Clos-Vougeot, one Regent.
In the second case it is very different. It is not on account of a providential scarcity that competition becomes impossible, but because force has repressed and put down competition that there is created among men a scarcity which ought not to have existed.—(Note extracted from MSS. left by the Author.)