ncy.

And there is much in the common experience of life and the common
conduct of business that seems to support this view. It is undoubtedly
true if we look at any little portion of business activity taken as a
fragment by itself. On the most purely selfish grounds I may find that
it "pays" to hire an expert at a hundred dollars a day, and might find
that it spelled ruin to attempt to raise the wages of my workingmen
beyond four dollars a day. Everybody knows that in any particular
business at any particular place and time with prices at any particular
point, there is a wage that can be paid and a wage that can not. And
everybody, or nearly everybody, bases on these obvious facts a series of
entirely erroneous conclusions. Because we cannot change the part we are
apt to think we cannot change the whole. Because one brick in the wall
is immovable, we forget that the wall itself might be rebuilt.

The single employer rightly knows that there is a wage higher than he
can pay and hours shorter than he can grant. But are the limits that
frame him in, real and necessary limits, resulting from the very nature
of things, or are they mere products of particular circumstances? This,
as a piece of pure economics, does not interest the individual employer
a particle. It belongs in the same category as the question of the
immortality of the soul and other profundities that have nothing to do
with business. But to society at large the question is of an infinite
importance.

Now the older economists taught, and the educated world for about a
century believed, that these limitations which hedged the particular
employer about were fixed and assigned by natural economic law. They
represented, as has been explained, the operation of the system of
natural liberty by which every man got what he is worth. And it is quite
true that the particular employer can no more break away from these
limits than he can jump out of his own skin. He can only violate them at
the expense of ceasing to be an economic being at all and degenerating
into a philanthropist.

But consider for a moment the peculiar nature of the limitations
themselves. Every man's limit of what he can pay and what he can take,
of how much he can offer and how much he will receive, is based on the
similar limitations of other people. They are reciprocal to one another.
Why should one factory owner not pay ten dollars a day to his hands?
Because the others don't. But suppose the