y establishing laws with courts to
interpret them and officials to enforce them. We do not, however,
assume that the direction of industrial affairs is in the hands of
such officials. In the main industry is organized in a spontaneous
way. Men choose such occupations as they like, and when there are too
many of them in one group and too few in another, the rewards
naturally increase in the group where a larger force is needed, and
this lures men in that direction.

In a socialistic society such adjustments would be made under the
direction of the state. Officials would have to decide when more
workers are needed in the A series and less in the B series and would
have to use either inducements or some kind of compulsion in order to
move them from the one group to the other. What we actually have to
deal with is a society that shapes itself by the free acts of
individuals, and we have to see how, in this way, it organizes itself
for production and divides among different claimants the product that,
by the joint action of all of them, it creates.

_Gains from the Organization of Industry._--The advantages of the
division of labor consist in an increase in the quantity of products
and in an improvement in their quality, and the quantitative gain is
almost beyond computing. The advantage appears mainly in the middle
and upper subgroups of the series, which transform the materials,
rather than in the lower subgroups, which produce them; and yet there
is a gain everywhere from such organization. A man produces far more
when he performs the same operation many times than when he goes
through a whole series of unlike operations. Moreover, he can perform
the single operation far more accurately and can thus attain a more
perfect result. He can learn his minute trade more easily than he
could a complex one. Where unusual strength or skill is required, the
work may be given to persons who have the requisite quality so that a
good product can be insured, and none of the labor of these superior
workers will need to be wasted on work which inferior labor can
perfectly well perform.

_Improvement in the Forms of Capital._--The greatest of all the
advantages that come from this division and subdivision of
wealth-creating processes comes in the way of applying machinery. A
machine is a hopeless specialist and can, as a rule, put only a single
minute touch on the material submitted to it; and the introduction of
machines differentiate