position akin
to that of the solitary hunter in a primitive forest--his income would
be essentially of his own making and would include all that he makes.
He would not, like the primitive man, get the literal things that he
fashions, but he would get the _amount of wealth_ that he creates--the
value of the literal products which take shape under his hand.

[1] It will be seen that we here assume for the process known
as competition a degree of perfection which it does not
attain in actual life. This process would be absolutely free
if labor could and would instantly abandon one industry and
enter another whenever it appeared that it could create an
increased product by so doing, and if capital also moved with
the same promptness on the smallest inducement. In actual
life there is friction to be overcome in the making of such
transfers, and this constitutes one of the subjects of the
theory of Economic Dynamics and will in later chapters be
fully considered.

Whenever either labor or capital thus moves to a new place in
the group system, it becomes an active competitor of the
labor or capital that was already there. We need a
definition of the competing process. In the case of producing
agents it consists in a rivalry in selling. The laborer who
moves from A' of the table that, in the preceding chapter,
has been used to represent organized industry to B', offers
for sale, as some would say, his service, or more accurately,
the product which his labor can create. The purchasers are
the employers in the subgroup B', and in order to induce them
to accept the new labor it is necessary to offer it at a rate
of pay which will make it worth their while to take it. If
the workers already in this division of the field are getting
just what they are worth, a larger force cannot be employed
at the same rate of wages, because, for a reason that will
later appear, the new labor cannot offer for sale as large a
product as an equal amount of the labor that is already
there. If the transfer to B' were made, the new labor would
have to accept lower pay than the old has been getting, and
the old labor would be forced to accept a cut in its rate of
pay or be supplanted by the new. A rate sufficiently low
would insure the employment of all. If the labor formerly in
this subgroup has been getting less t