e cost
of building forty million dollar ships that can be sunk in six or seven
minutes with one well aimed torpedo, the limit has been reached, and
bankruptcy sooner or later ensues. Capitalism is now paying that price
throughout most of Europe.

3. _A third obstacle to the continuance of the capitalist system lies
in the fact that it has fallen into the hands of profiteers (bankers
and absentee owners) whose chief purposes are to control economic
machinery for the money there is in it, and to guarantee their
clients (investors) an opportunity to live without working on the
labor of others._

By the very nature of their connections the managers of industry are
denied the right to think in economic terms. Their function is to "make
money" by exploiting nature and men. They are therefore profiteers
rather than producers, and no economic system can hope to survive unless
it is based on production rather than profiteering.

4. _The present economic system is in the hands of those who are
responsible to wealth (stockholders) and not to the masses of the
people._

A small fraction of the people in a modern industrial community--one in
30 or 40 or 50--holds the controlling vote in the strategic industrial
enterprises, and says the final word on all questions of industrial
policy. Their interest is a property interest. Automatically they are
precluded and prevented from thinking or acting in the interest of the
general welfare, since their clientele, which is seeking to live on the
labor of the masses of their fellow citizens, is only a minute part of
the general public.

5. _There is another limitation arising out of the third and fourth,
just enumerated--the limitation imposed upon the whole of society by
the incessant struggle between the owners of industry and the workers
in industry._

While the owning class continues, without labor, to derive an income
from the labor of the workers, the former will grip their privileges,
while the latter will oppose, obstruct, attack and ultimately deny the
rights of the owners.

These five limitations: centralization, nationalism, profiteering, the
handling of economic affairs in the name of property rather than in that
of human welfare, and the class struggle--make it difficult or
impossible for the directors of the present economic system to extend it
in response to the pressing demand for expansion. Like other social
systems that have p