Liberty and Property.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

Liberty and Property 41in the cannery industry. And there are otherequally selfish capitalists who, in many hundredsof other corporations, provide consumerswith many hundreds of other things.The better a corporation serves the public,the more customers it gets, the biggerit grows. Go into the home of the averageAmerican family and you will see for whomthe wheels of the machines are turning.In a free country nobody is preventedfrom acquiring riches by serving the consumersbetter than they are served already.What he needs is only brains and hard work.“Modern civilization, nearly all civilization,”said Edwin Cannan, the last in a long lineof eminent British economists, “is based onthe principle of making things pleasant forthose who please the market, and unpleasantfor those who fail to do so.” All this talkabout the concentration of economic poweris vain. The bigger a corporation is, the moreEdwin Cannan, An Economist’s Protest (London, 1928), pp.VI ff.