ed and factories are built. Wherever work is
to be done, men come in about the right number to do it. It is not
mere chance that produces this result. The available skill is adjusted
to varying needs by the delicate measurement of the market rate of
wages. Two-sided competition gives a definite rule of price--the only
definite impersonal rule. The theoretical competitive price is the
standard to which things tend constantly to adjust themselves in an
open market.[8]

Competition is an essentially economic method as contrasted with the
legal and personal methods above and later described, because it
is impersonal and reducible to a rule of value. Distribution under
competition is made, not with reference to abstract ethical principles
or to personal affection, but to the value of the product. Each worker
strives to do what will bring him the largest return, and the price
others pay expresses their estimates of the service in that market.
Each seeking his own interest is led to make himself more valuable to
others. In most cases and in large measure, competition stimulates men
to sacrifice, to invention, to preparation; thus is zeal animated and
are efforts sustained. In the economic realm, as is now seen to be the
case in the biologic realm, competition of some effective kind is
an indispensable condition not only of progress but of life without
degeneration. Monopoly, as we have noted, never has ceased to
rest under the ban of Anglo-Saxon law, and therefore to exemplify
compulsory, as opposed to competitive distribution. A striking feature
of the competitive method is its decentralization. Each helps to value
the economic services of each. If one pays more for the services of
the singer than for those of the cook, it is not because one would
rather listen to the singing than to eat when starving, but because by
apportioning one's income one can get the singing and the eating too.
In the existing circumstances, the singer's services seem to the music
lover to be worth paying for, and he backs his opinion with his money.
So each is measuring the services of all others, and all are valuing
the services of each. It is distribution by valuation, and it is
valuation by democracy.

Sec. 8. #Wide acceptance of competition.# On purely abstract and _a
priori_ grounds competition cannot be accorded an ethical sanction, as
is sometimes assumed. But because of the qualities above outlined, and
because it meets in large measure the