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Trusts, Pools and Corners as Affecting Commerce and Industry
Trusts Pools and Corners as Affecting Commerce and Industry Author:James Stephen Jeans 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: CHAPTER IV. THE FUNCTION OF THE STATE. Much has been written on the part that the Government of a State should play in reference to combinations designed t... more »o limit production, to augment prices artificially, to create a scarcity of a necessary commodity, or to injure by any similar means the interests of consumers, as such. The tendency of all such movements is to create monopolies of the worst kind, and in another chapter I have dealt with the subject from the monopoly point of view. But there are those who would go much farther than imposing pains and penalties against the worst evils of monopolies. The fact that monopolies tend to create scarcity and increase prices has always been cited against them, and used for their suppression, so that monopolists have had a hard fight to maintain their existence. But there are obvious reasons why legislation, intended to keep down monopoly, should stop short of any interference with legitimate enterprise, and should not make it entirely impossible to adopt what may be perfectly proper and much-needed expedients ,to cure the manifold evils of over-production and cut-throat competition. The economic history of England up to about a hundred years ago is almost one continuous record of statutory interference with the natural course of prices, either by granting monopolies, or by fixing by an arbitrary procedure the pricesat which labour as well as commodities should be sold. Nowadays these sumptuary laws are universally reprobated,( and modern nations have passed over from the extremist forms of paternal government to a regime under which the liberty of the subject is paramount, and the prevailing creed is that the greatest service that the State can render to commerce and industry is to let them alone. The public are supposed to be s...« less