The competitive system having been tried and found good—or at least so it is assumed—it is felt that the system will have to be accepted with the defects of its qualities. Its characteristic qualities are held to be good, acceptable to the tastes of modern men whose habits of thought have been standardised in its terms; and it would be only reluctantly and by tardy concession that these modern men could bring themselves to give up that scheme of "Natural Liberty" within the framework of which runs this competitive system of business management and its wasteful manifolding of half-idle equipment and nugatory work. The common man, at the worst, comforts himself and his neighbour with the sage reflection that "It might have been worse." The businessmen, on the other hand, have also begun to take note of this
systematic waste by duplication and consequent incompetence, and have taken counsel how to intercept the waste and divert it to their own profit. The businessmen's remedy is consolidation of competing concerns, and monopoly control.
To the common man, with his preconceptions on the head of "restraint of trade," the proposed remedy seems more vicious than the evil it is designed to cure. The fault of the remedy plainly is not that the mismanagement of affairs due to competitive business can not be corrected by recourse to monopoly, but only that the community, it is presumed, would still suffer all the burdens and discomforts of the régime of competition and sabotage, with, possibly, further inconveniences and impositions at the hands of the businesslike monopoly; which, men are agreed, may fairly be depended on to use its advantage unsparingly under the business principle of charging what the traffic will bear.
There is also this other singular phenomenon in this modern industrial world, that something not very far short of one-half the industrial equipment systematically lies idle for something approaching one-half the time, or is worked only to one-half its capacity half the time; not because of competition between these several industrial concerns, but because business conditions will not allow its continued productive use; because the volume of product that would be turned out if the equipment were working uninterruptedly at its full capacity could not be sold at remunerative prices. From time to time one establishment and another will shut down during a period of slack times, for the same reason.
This state of things is singular only as seen from the point of view of the community's material interest, not
that it is in any degree unfamiliar or that any serious fault is found with the captains of industry for so shutting off the industrial process and letting the industrial equipment lie waste. As all men know, the exigencies of business will not tolerate production to supply the community's needs under these circumstances; although, as is equally notorious, these slack times, when production of goods is unadvisable on grounds of business expediency, are commonly times of wide-spread privation, "hard times," in the community at large, when the failure of the supply is keenly felt.
It is not that the captains of industry are at fault in so failing, or refusing, to supply the needs of the community under these circumstances, but only that they are helpless under the exigencies of business. They can not supply the goods except for a price, indeed not except for a remunerative price, a price which will add something to the capital values which they are venturing in their various enterprises. So long as the exigencies of price and of pecuniary gain rule the case, there is manifestly no escaping this enforced idleness of the country's productive forces.
It may not be out of place also to remark, by way of parenthesis, that this highly productive state of the industrial arts, which is embodied in the industrial plant and processes that so are systematically and advisedly retarded or arrested under the rule of business, is at the same time the particular pride of civilised men and the most tangible achievement of the civilised world.
A conservative estimate of this one item of capitalistic sabotage could scarcely appraise it at less than a twenty-five percent reduction from the normally possible productive capacity of the community, at an average over
any considerable period; and a somewhat thorough review of the pertinent facts would probably persuade any impartial observer that, one year with another, such businesslike enforced idleness of plant and personnel lowers the actual output of the country's industry by something nearer fifty percent of its ordinary capacity when fully employed. To many, such an assertion may seem extravagant, but with further reflection on the well-known facts in the case it will seem less so in proportion as the unfamiliarity of it wears off.