point.

All this has been said of industry under monopoly. But it will be seen
to apply in its essentials to what we call competitive industry. Here
indeed certain new features come in. Not one employer but many produce
each kind of article. And, as far as each employer can see by looking at
his own horizon, what he does is merely to produce as much as he can
sell at a price that pays him. Since all the other employers are doing
this, there will be, under competition, a constant tendency to cut the
prices down to the lowest that is consistent with what the employer has
to pay as wages and interest. This point, which was called by the
orthodox economists the "cost," is not in any true and fundamental sense
of the words the "cost" at all. It is merely a limit represented by what
the other parties to the bargain are able to exact. The whole situation
is in a condition of unstable equilibrium in which the conflicting
forces represented by the interests of the various parties pull in
different directions. The employers in any one line of industry and all
their wage earners and salaried assistants have one and the same
interest as against the consumer. They want the selling price to be as
high as possible. But the employers are against one another as wanting,
each of them, to make as many sales as possible, and each and all the
employers are against the wage earners in wanting to pay as low wages as
possible. If all the employers unite, the situation turns to a monopoly,
and the price paid by the consumer is settled on the monopoly basis
already described. The employers can then dispute it out with their
working men as to how much wages shall be. If the employers are not
united, then at each and every moment they are in conflict both with
the consumer and with their wage earners. Thus the whole scene of
industry represents a vast and unending conflict, a fermentation in
which the moving bubbles crowd for space, expanding and breaking one
against the other. There is no point of rest. There is no real fixed
"cost" acting as a basis. Anything that any one person or group of
persons--worker or master, landlord or capitalist--is able to exact
owing to the existing conditions of demand or supply, becomes a "cost"
from the point of view of all the others. There is nothing in this
"cost" which proportions to it the quantity of labor, or of time, or of
skill or of any other measure physical or psychological of the effort
involved. And