Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/77

production, which are the forerunners of depression. For a normally full wage of efficiency in a competitive industry will tend to keep down profits also to a subsistence wage for capital, and during a trade revival the increased product would be distributed between the two, more in their capacity of consumers than of producers. That is to say, given a competitive trade, prices would not rise rapidly or greatly, and the larger money incomes received both by employers and employed for the fuller utilisation of their productive powers would be realised in an increased purchasing power over commodities.

In non-competitive or monopolistic trade, so far as it is left in private hands, and in default of public price-control, taxation is, as we perceive, the proper remedy.

The conjunction of these two policies will be efficacious in checking depressions and unemployment in proportion as, by expanding private and public consumption, it furnishes a regular elective demand for the maximum output of the industrial system. This, of course, does not assume a statical condition of industry. As the arts of industry advance, a given quantity of human productive energy is able to turn out an increasing quantity of consumable goods. An increasing population with a rising standard of consumption is able to purchase and consume the increasing output. But the advancing arts of industry require for their effective operation large quantities of new capital. This need involves the continuous sacrifice of a certain amount of immediate consumption in order to supply that capital. But that certain amount