prices, and handling goods or services that are of vital and indispensable importance to the community, are in a position to levy tribute upon other trades and the consuming public, taking a share of the national income which measures their economic strength, not their skill, efforts, or needs.
This seizure of an unearned surplus by organised economic force has, of course, a wider sphere of action than the nation. It is a marked and disconcerting feature of the world-economy. Almost everywhere the growers of foods and raw materials, wide-spread and ill-organised, are at the mercy of banks or local money-lenders, the owners of transport and storage, and the wholesale dealers who handle their product and often finance its production. This weakness of the farmer in most countries is a source of growing discontent. Many agricultural products are handled by wholesale agents and by retail local traders so as to apportion a small and diminishing proportion of the final retail price to the farmer.
There are other important cleavages of interest in the realms of industry and finance, sometimes within the national area, sometimes in the world markets. Wherever effective combination displaces or limits competition, in the national or international markets, that efficiency of combination means a higher price, usually achieved by an agreed restriction either of output or of market, or both. In an increasing number of commodities, many of them highly specialised articles, such as chemicals and the rarer metals, international cartels are in control, regulating
