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Standards of Reasonableness in Local Freight Discriminations
Standards of Reasonableness in Local Freight Discriminations Author:John Maurice Clark Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: broadening of this concept. The first and narrowest application was that of Mill. He has in mind the case where production of one thing involves necessarily and ... more »with little or no extra expense the production of other different things, or by-products, in a practically fixed proportion. For a given amount of coal-gas, a definite amount of coke is inevitably produced. The first step in broadening this concept is that taken by Prof. Taussig in applying it to railway services.' Not only do these services have a joint cost, but each has a considerable special or prime cost of its own, while the relative proportion in which they are produced can be varied at will—two facts which were true of the older joint- cost concept only in the most limited way. Another concept, allied to that of joint cost, and still more clearly applicable to the case of railways, had already been recognized by at least one American writer, General Walker. Although he did not give it sharpness by the use of any special terminology, he developed clearly the doctrine that the existence of a large fixed plant may cause market price to differ from normal price. For labor and capital are thereby committed to production, even though the price of the output fails to bring in the normal reward to their " efforts and abstinence."' In England, Prof. Marshall, in two bookspublished near the time of the appearance of Prof. Taus- sig's article, presented the same idea in a more developed form and with an apt terminology, which has already been mentioned. But besides this, he took a still further step toward generalizing the joint-cost concept. For though in using the terms "joint supply" and "joint products"' he means primarily by-products, still he does admit railway services under the same concept." For he holds—and this ...« less