not in any way
add to the productive efficiency of the firm, but they acquire shares
which will entitle them to an increased return. Normally, if the
market is favorable, they part with the greater number of them as soon
as they are acquired. But, whether they do so or not, what has
occurred is a process by which the business element in industry obtains
the right to a larger share of the product, without in any way
increasing the efficiency of the service which is offered to the
consumer.

Other examples of the manner in which the control of {174} production
by "business" cuts across the line of economic progress are the wastes
of competitive industry and the profits of monopoly. It is well known
that the price paid by the consumer includes marketing costs, which to
a varying, but to a large, extent are expenses not of supplying the
goods, but of supplying them under conditions involving the expenses of
advertisement and competitive distribution. For the individual firm
such expenses, which enable it to absorb part of a rival's trade, may
be an economy: to the consumer of milk or coal--to take two flagrant
instances--they are pure loss. Nor, as is sometimes assumed, are such
wastes confined to distribution. Technical reasons are stated by
railway managers to make desirable a unification of railway
administration and by mining experts of mines. But, up to the war,
business considerations maintained the expensive system under which
each railway company was operated as a separate system, and still
prevent collieries, even collieries in the same district, from being
administered as parts of a single organization. Pits are drowned out
by water, because companies cannot agree to apportion between them the
costs of a common drainage system; materials are bought, and products
sold, separately, because collieries will not combine; small coal is
left in to the amount of millions of tons because the most economical
and technically efficient working of the seams is not necessarily that
which yields the largest profit to the business men who control
production. In this instance the wide differences in economic strength
which exist between different mines discourage the unification which is
economically desirable; naturally the {175} directors of a company
which owns "a good thing" do not desire to merge interests with a
company working coal that is poor in quality or expensive to mine.
When, as increasingly happens in othe