The Principles of Economics Part 60

2. How many of the men you know at the head of large businesses started life poor?

3. Was the rise in fortune due most often to chance, inheritance of wealth, or exceptional ability and power of work?

4. How should the income of an inventor be cla.s.sified, as wages or profits?

5. Are the profits of the employer deducted from wages? Are the high wages of skilled labor deducted from the wages of unskilled?

CHAPTER 32. PROFIT-SHARING, PRODUCERS' AND CONSUMERS' COoPERATION

1. Describe any case of profit-sharing you may have seen in operation.

2. Is advertising of any social service or is its sole purpose to divert trade from one merchant to another?

3. In what ways are retail stores wasteful in their expenditures? Can this be avoided?

4. If you have seen a cooperative store in operation tell what was its success.

5. Are you willing to pay more for goods in order to have a choice of stores?

CHAPTER 33. MONOPOLY PROFITS

1. How is the blacksmith free to compete with the physician and how not?

In what sense have we a.s.sumed that compet.i.tion exists?

2. Is there compet.i.tion between the owner of good land and the owner of poor land?

3. Has the owner of a poor gold-mine a monopoly? Has the owner of a rich mine a monopoly?

4. Does the owners.h.i.+p of land give a monopoly? The owners.h.i.+p of a horse?

5. In what sense is a street-railway a monopoly? What is the value of its franchise?

6. Why does the public consent to grant patents or public franchises?

7. If one company controlled all the petroleum in the world, what would it consider in fixing the selling price?

8. Why will railroads issue commutation tickets?

NOTE.--Of the very large recent literature bearing on monopoly and trusts may be mentioned as especially useful: J. B. Clark, _Control of Trusts_; R. T. Ely, _Monopolies and Trusts_; J. W. Jenks, _The Trust Problem_ (a summary by the expert for the Industrial Commission); J. E. le Rossignol, _Monopolies, Past and Present_; _Report of the Chicago Conference on Trusts, 1899_; _Report of the United States Industrial Commission_, 19 vols., 1900-2 (a mine of information).

CHAPTER 34. GROWTH OF TRUSTS AND COMBINATIONS

1. What advantages are there to manufacturers in combination? What to the public?

2. What relation has improved transportation and other means of communication to trusts?

3. Name as many economic monopolies as you can.

4. What large trusts have recently been formed?

5. Does the public consider the growth of trusts to be good or bad? What do students of the question think of it?

CHAPTER 35. EFFECT OF TRUSTS ON PRICES

1. Can the large factory always outsell the small one? Why?

2. Why are trusts or selling agreements formed?

3. Describe any agreement of which you know, made between merchants or manufacturers for the purpose of regulating prices. Did prices go up or down as a result?

4. Would it be a good thing for society if a trust made great economies in production, crowded out its smaller compet.i.tors, and maintained prices just where they were before, dividing among its shareholders the amounts saved?

5. How would the effects on society be different if prices were reduced by better organization and the prevention of waste?

6. Is it good public policy to allow a trust to undersell its smaller compet.i.tor in one district while it keeps up its prices elsewhere?

CHAPTER 36. GAMBLING, SPECULATION, AND PROMOTERS' PROFITS

1. Do you think that store-keepers fix the price of the produce they buy of the farmers? If so, to what extent?

2. Can brokers fix the price of grain on the market? How, and to what extent?

3. What is speculation? Give examples you have seen.

4. Were they, on the whole, good for the community?

5. Give other examples showing the difference between a gambling-house and an insurance company?

6. Is the immorality of betting based on economic grounds?

7. Ought lotteries to be permitted by law?

8. Ought speculation in mines to be permitted by law?

9. Ought the profits of the farmer from a sudden rise in the value of wheat be confiscated to the public?

NOTE.--The ablest study of the subject is by H. C. Emery, _Speculation on the Stock and Produce Exchanges of the United States_, in Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, Vol. VII, No. 2, 1896.

CHAPTER 37. CRISES AND INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSIONS

1. What is a financial crisis? An industrial depression?

2. Define the expressions "over-production" and "under-consumption."