Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/96

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Chapter V
Labour and Its Product

We have seen that under Capitalism the course of production and the question of the prices at which goods and services shall be sold is left to the decision of the average consumer, and that Capitalism is thus truly democratic in spirit as compared with the bureaucratic tyranny that would be set up by State Socialism or the Guild tyranny that the Guild Socialists would set up if ever they could arrive at a workable scheme; that the price which the consumer pays for an article has to cover payment for services rendered by labour, management, capitalists and adventurers; that the claim of capital to its interest and profit is admitted by Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to be sound, and can be shown to be so by a statement of the obvious facts about production. But the question of the share that the wage-earners are to get out of the price paid by the consumer has not yet been tackled, and it