Section CXIII.. Exceptions. (continued.)

Exceptions. (Continued.)

Other impediments in the way of freedom of competition have their origin in social conditions. The rule governing prices applies only where the vendor and purchaser are equally ready to exchange. But in every case in which the producer carries on his business, not for the sake of free gain, but simply to obtain a means of livelihood, it may be subject to many important exceptions.(669) The richer a seller is, the longer can he wait for a favorable opportunity to sell. Thus, for instance, wheat is somewhat lower in price at times when payments are universally made than at other seasons of the year, because a great many country people are then compelled to sell. Where the country population are universally needy, it sinks after a harvest to an unusually low figure, and in spring rises again very high.

Sometimes price is affected by the agreements of the purchaser or seller, but most readily by those of middlemen between consumer and producer.(670) Customs peculiar to whole classes may exert the same influence, and such customs are especially powerful in the lower stages of business and industrial development. They, even at the present time, take the place, frequently, of freedom of competition in retail business, in the book business, and in the determination of lawyers’ and doctors’ fees, as well as in the distribution of a nation’s income among the three great branches of its general economy,(671) deciding, instead of competition, how much shall go to each. Wherever there are guilds, communities, castes etc. with legal privileges; wherever there are difficulties placed in the way of exportation and importation; wherever preëmption rights or monopolies,(672) in the strict sense of the word, exist, the leveling ebb and flow of the elements of production may be still more seriously interfered with. Legislation(673) of this sort injures the non-privileged portion of the population more than it helps the privileged portion. (See § 97.)(674)

The word usury, so arbitrarily used in every-day language, should be admitted in science only to designate a famine-price, fraudulently and intentionally caused or intensified.