[2] In this treatise the term profits will be used to designate the net increase which may remain in employers' hands after paying the wages of labor of every kind and interest on all capital used. The term gross profits describes a sum made up of this net profit and interest on the capital.
[3] The preceding paragraphs may seem to show that if an entrepreneur ever gets an income, he does it by wresting from labor and capital a part of their products. We shall see that in dynamic industry there is a normal way in which he may get an income without taking anything from the incomes that labor and capital would get if he did not perform his part. His return may come from the result of an enabling act which he performs, whereby both the labor and the capital of a particular subgroup become more productive than other labor and capital are and more so than they would be if the entrepreneur's enabling act were not performed.
CHAPTER VI
VALUE AND ITS RELATION TO DIFFERENT INCOMES
Functional distribution controls personal incomes since each man who gets, in a normal way, any income at all performs one or more productive functions, and his total income is the sum of the returns for these several functions. Moreover under such a condition of ideally perfect competition as we have assumed each of these functions is rewarded according to the product that it creates; and each man accordingly is paid an amount that equals the total product which he personally creates. Men's products, even in the disturbed conditions of actual life, set the standards to which their returns tend to conform, though they vary from them in ways that we shall not fail to notice.
Group Distribution.—The grand total of the social income has to go through a preliminary division before it is shared by laborers, capitalists, and entrepreneurs. In each industry the pay of all these functionaries comes from the selling price of the commercial article that they coöperate in making. The price of shoes pays all shoemakers, whether what they contribute to the manufacturing is labor, capital, or mere coördination; and it also pays ranchmen and tanners for what they contribute in the shape of leather, raw and dressed. If the price of shoes should rise, there would be a larger income for the group whose activities create them. So if woolen clothing were to become dearer, there would be more money for the group that makes it, and this would include those who raise sheep and those who convert wool into cloth, as well as the garment makers themselves. The question, what members of a group would get the benefit of a rise in the price of its product, is one that must be discussed in connection with economic dynamics, and we shall find, when we reach this part of the subject, that it is entrepreneurs' gains which come largely from sources like this. We have already seen that, in a static condition and with prices, wages, and interest immovably held at rates to which perfectly free competition would bring them, entrepreneurs as such would get nil, and the whole price of every article would be distributed among the laborers and the capitalists who make it. The proof of this will appear when we have examined the process by which the values of goods are adjusted, and this will help to prepare the way for a study of the sources of net profits, which are an all-important feature of actual business. Society is honest or dishonest according as this entrepreneurs' income is gained in one way or in another; and it is not too much to say that before the court of last resort, the body of the people, no system of business will be allowed permanently to stand unless the basic principle of it tends to eliminate dishonest profits. A chief purpose of static studies is to afford a means of testing the legitimacy of the incomes that come to entrepreneurs.
Market Price.—The old phrase supply and demand describes the process by which the market price of anything is determined. The total mercantile stock of goods of a particular kind at any one time on hand is, of course, an exact quantity, and the law of "market value," when these words are used in a restricted and technical sense, determines the price at which this predetermined amount can be sold.
How a Normal Supply is Determined.—This present stock, however, was brought into existence by producers who looked forward to the time when they could probably sell it at a certain price; and the higher this anticipated return for the article, the more of it they were induced to make. The price, which to-day depends on the quantity on hand, acted in advance as a lure to bring that quantity into existence, and among the different articles which men can produce, they are forever singling out for increased production those things which offer the strongest lures—that is, the things that sell for the largest amounts as compared with the cost of making them. The ultimate tendency of all this is a certain adjustment of the relative supplies of different commodities. It is that adjustment which brings all prices to a level determined by cost.