Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution
cost of manufacture? We do not urge that the employers and the shareholders would suffer, though that consideration has its importance as long as the capitalist rule subsists and the owners of money play in national economics a part which, willing or unwilling, we must take into account. But we do urge that the consumer would suffer. Now the consumer is Mr. Everyone, and we can picture no system less democratic than that which would hand him over, bound hand and foot, to the sovereign will of the staff of each factory. Moreover, though one may profess to disdain this ethical consideration, we would soon find ourselves compelled to bow to economic fatality, this sanction of the rights of the consumer in the world of facts. Any industrial exploitation which did not supervise either the quality or the quantity, or the price of its production, would soon give way before the competition of better organized industry from without, and should any attempt be made to lessen the consequences of this by fiscal measures or by other Protectionist proceedings, it would lead to the paralysis of national production.
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