happens that these
investors are not only not given to the increase and diffusion of
technological knowledge, but they have a well-advised interest in
retarding or defeating improvements in the industrial arts in detail.
Improvements, innovations that heighten productive efficiency in the
general line of production in which a given investment is placed, are
commonly to be counted on to bring "obsolescence by supersession" to the
plant already engaged in that line; and therefore to bring a decline in
its income-yielding capacity, and so in its capital or investment value.

Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the
community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of
this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material
appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of
established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations designed to
supersede these appliances. The bearing of ownership on industry and on
the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing
which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts,
and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the
supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and
privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit
to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the
workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the
market.

The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing
of private ownership in the pursuit of private gain, by persons who can
show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and
whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage--refusal to
let production go on except it affords them an unearned income--the
expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay
the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find
that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or
useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of
superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic
establishments.

This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it
may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth; nor does the question here turn on its
adequacy as a statement of fact. Without pr