cers often have
other advantages than those which depend on location. In a shop which
is more like that of a craftsman of three centuries ago than it is
like the great furniture factory, a cabinetmaker can make a single
chair of a special pattern more cheaply than the great manufacturer
can afford to do it. The great shop requires that there should be many
articles of a kind turned out by its elaborate machines in order that
the owner should get the benefit of their rapid and unerring action.
There will long be at work hand presses much like those used by
Benjamin Franklin, besides the complicated automata which do the bulk
of our printing, because for printing a dozen copies of anything the
lever press is the cheaper. There will be shoemakers who not only mend
shoes but occasionally make them for customers who want other than
standard kinds; and local tailors are sure to survive. Only in the
general market and in the making of standard goods is size essential
to success.

_A Considerable Number of Competitors Assumed._--The most striking
phenomenon of our time is the consolidation of independent
establishments by the forming of what are usually called trusts; and
this and all the approaches to it are precluded by the static
hypothesis. There is a question whether, after competition has reduced
the establishments in one subgroup to a half dozen or less, they would
not, even without forming a trust, act as a quasi-monopoly. This
question we have at the proper point fully to discuss, but here it is
necessary to assume that nothing which creates even a quasi-monopoly
exists. We shall find that competition usually would, in fact,
survive and be extremely effective among as few as five or six
competitors, till they formed some sort of union with each other. To
avoid all uncertainty we assume that in the static state in which
values, wages, and interest are natural and in which each subgroup has
its perfectly normal share of labor and capital, there are competitors
enough in each occupation to preclude all question as to the
continuance of an active rivalry.

_Static Values and Prices._--The equilibrium referred to requires that
all values should stand at their static levels, which means that the
prices of goods should be the "cost prices" of the older economists.
The _entrepreneur_ should make no net profit on the goods he is
producing. The wages of labor must be productivity wages, since each
man must get the amount of w