rican cities at the present time; and, of course, any particular
lease must be arranged so as to provide not only the interest on the
money raised for all work of construction, but for the extinction of the
debt thereby incurred. Furthermore a city adopting such a policy should
push it to the limit. Wherever, as is so often the case, private
companies now enjoy a complete or a substantial monopoly of any service,
and do so by virtue of permanent franchises, every legal means should be
taken to nullify such an intolerable appropriation of the resources of
the community. Persistent and ruthless war should be declared upon these
unnatural monopolies, because as long as they exist they are an absolute
bar to any thoroughly democratic and constructive system of municipal
economy. Measures should be taken which under other circumstances would
be both unfair and unwise for the deliberate purpose of bringing them to
terms, and getting them to exchange their permanent possession of these
franchises for a limited tenancy. Permanent commissions should be placed
over them with the right and duty of interfering officiously in their
business. Taxation should be made to bear heavily upon them. Competitive
services should be established wherever this could be done without any
excessive loss. They should be annoyed and worried in every legal way;
and all those burdens should be imposed upon them with the explicit
understanding that they were measures of war. In adopting such a policy
a community would be fighting for an essential condition of future
economic integrity and well-being, and it need not be any more
scrupulous about the means employed (always "under the law") than would
an animal in his endeavor to kill some blood-sucking parasite. The
corporation should plainly be told that the fight would be abandoned
wherever it was ready to surrender its unlimited franchises for a
limited but exclusive monopoly, which in these cases should in all
fairness run for a longer term than would be ordinarily permissible.

I have lingered over the case of corporations enjoying municipal
franchises, because they offer the only existing illustration of a
specific economic situation--a situation in which a monopolized service
is based upon exclusive and permanent economic advantages. Precisely the
same situation does not exist in any other part of the economic area;
but the idea is that under a policy of properly regulated recognition
such a situati