[Footnote 2:  This change will be described below in ch. 6, in treating of the standard of deferred payments.]

[Footnote 3:  See Vol.  I, pp. 265, 278, 508 for the distinction between wealth and capital.]

[Footnote 4:  See Vol.  I, p. 25, for the definition of utility.]

[Footnote 5:  See Vol.  I, p. 510 on the paradox of value.]

[Footnote 6:  That is, “the amount which can be developed upon the basis of the flowage of the streams for a period of two weeks in which the flow is the least,” all the rest being allowed to escape unused.  Van Hise, “Conservation of Natural Resources,” p. 119.]

[Footnote 7:  These and other figures in this section relate to the year 1913.]

[Footnote 8:  Coal has been mentioned above, sec. 9.]

CHAPTER 2

THE PRESENT ECONOMIC SYSTEM

Sec. 1.  The place of private property.  Sec. 2.  Nature of property.  Sec. 3.  Relation of wealth, property, and capital.  Sec. 4.  Some theories of private property.  Sec. 5.  Origin vs. justification.  Sec. 6.  Limitations of private property.  Sec. 7.  Limitations of bequest and inheritance.  Sec. 8.  Social expediency of private property.  Sec. 9.  The monetary economy.  Sec. 10.  The competitive system.  Sec. 11.  Limitation of competition by custom.  Sec. 12.  Effect of modern forces upon custom.  Sec. 13.  Adam Smith’s influence.  Sec. 14.  The wage-system.

Sec. 1. #The place of private property#.  Of fully equal importance with material wealth in determining the economic power of a people is the social system under which the nation lives.  This is the term applied to the whole complex of institutions and arrangements in which and by which people live together in society.  It is the embodiment of the opinions, ideas, and habits of life inherited by each generation from its forbears.  It is, indeed, a people’s whole state of civilization with its political, economic, intellectual, scientific, religious, and esthetic aspects.

The most important economic aspect of the existing system is, broadly speaking, the institution of private property.  So closely connected with this that they are hardly more than different phases of the same thing, are the use of money (the monetary economy), the wage system, and competition as a mode of distribution.  “The institution of private property” is the general expression for the way in which men in the modern state make use of their own energies and of material wealth within the nation.  Nearly all the total of the things mentioned in the table in Chapter 2, section 4, are owned by private citizens.[1] We live in a regime of private property, and all our economic problems are affected by that fact.  The determination of the exact boundaries of private property makes up a large part of the politico-economic problems which the people in each generation have to solve.  A large share, possibly, in a certain sense, every one of the economic problems that are discussed involve change, limitation, definition, or, more radically, abolition of present laws of property.  Broadly understood, as above, therefore, determination of the nature of private property is the essential economic problem.