The Theory of Business Enterprise. Thorstein Veblen
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so made between variations in the one or the other member of a value ratio has a meaning - which it is not always clear that it has - it does not touch the argument. It is a matter of common notoriety, which has also had the benefit of reiterated statistical proof, that, as measured, for instance, in terms of livelihood or of labor, the value of money has varied incontinently throughout the course of history.
But in the routine of business throughout the nineteenth century the assumed stability of the money unit has served as an axiomatic principle, in spite of facts which have from time to time shown the falsity of that assumption.49
The all-dominating issue in business is the question of gain and loss. Gain and loss is a question of accounting, and the accounts are kept in terms of the money unit, not in terms of livelihood, nor in terms of the serviceability of the goods, nor in terms of the mechanical efficiency of the industrial or commercial plant. For business purposes, and so far as the business man habitually looks into the matter, the last term of all transactions is their outcome in money values. The base line of every enterprise is a line of capitalization in money values. In current business practice, variations from this base line are necessarily rated as variations on the part of the other factors in the case, not as variations of the base line. The business man judges of events from the standpoint of ownership, and ownership runs in terms of money.50
Investments are made for profit, and industrial plants and processes are capitalized on the basis of their profit-yielding capacity. In the accepted scheme of things among business men, profits are included as intrinsic to the conduct of business. So that, in place of the presumption in favor of a simple pecuniary stability of wealth, such as prevails in the rating of possessions outside of business traffic, there prevails within the range of business traffic the presumption that there must in the natural course of things be a stable and orderly increase of the property invested. Under no economic system earlier than the advent of the machine industry does profit on investment seem to have been accounted a normal or unquestionably legitimate source of gain. Under the agrarian-manorial regime of the Middle Ages it was not felt that the wealth of the large owners must, as a matter of course, increase by virtue of the continued employment of what they already had in hand - whatever may be the historical fact as regards the increase of wealth in their hands. Particularly, it was not the sense of the men of that time that wealth so employed must increase at any stated, "ordinary" rate per time unit. Similarly as regards other traffic in those days, even as regards mercantile ventures. Gain from investment was felt to be a fortuitous matter, not reducible to a stated rate. This is reflected, e.g., in the tenacious protests against the taking or paying of interest and in the ingenious sophistries by which the payment of interest was defended or explained away. Only under more settled commercial relations during the era of handicraft did the payment of interest gradually come to be accepted into full legitimacy. But even then gains from other business employments than mercantile traffic were apparently viewed as an increase due to productive labor rather than as a profit on investment.51 In industrial pursuits, as distinct from mercantile traffic proper, profits apparently come to figure as a regular and ordinary incident only when the industries come to be carried on on a mercantile basis by relatively large employers working with hired labor.
This orderly increase is, of course, taken account of in terms of the money unit. The "ordinary" rate of profits in business is looked upon as a matter of course by the body of business men. It is part of their common-sense view of affairs, and is therefore a normal phenomenon.52 Gain, they feel, is normal, being the purpose of all their endeavors; whereas a loss or a shrinkage in the values invested is felt to be an untoward accident which does not belong in the normal course of business, and which requires particular explanation. The normality, or matter-of-course character, of profits in the modern view is well shown by the position of those classical economists who are inclined to include "ordinary profits" in the cost of production of goods.
The precise meaning of "ordinary profits" need not detain the argument. It may mean net average profits, or it may mean something else. The phrase is sufficiently intelligible to the business community to permit the business men to use it without definition and to rest their reasoning about business affairs on it as a secure and stable concept; and it is this commonplace resort to the term that is the point of interest here.
At any given time and place there is an accepted ordinary rate of profits, more or less closely defined, which, it is felt, should accrue to any legitimate and ordinarily judicious business venture. However shifty the definition of this rate of profits may be, in concrete, objective terms, it is felt by the men of affairs to be of so substantial and consistent a character that they habitually capitalize the property engaged in any given business venture on the basis of this ordinary rate of profits. Due regard being had to any special advantages and drawbacks of the individual case, any given business venture or plant is capitalized at such a multiple of its earning-capacity as the current ordinary rate of profits will warrant.53
Proceeding on the common-sense view built up out of this range of habits of thought with respect to normal profits and price phenomena, the business community holds that times are ordinary or normal so long as the accepted or reasonable rate of profits accrues on the accustomed capitalization; whereas times are good or brisk if the rate of gain is accelerated, and hard or dull if profits decline. This is the meaning of the phrases, "brisk times" and "dull times," as currently used in any business community.
Under the exigencies of the quest of profits, as conditioned by the larger industry and the more sweeping business organization of the last few decades, the question of capital in business has increasingly become a question of capitalization on the basis of earning-capacity, rather than a question of the magnitude of the industrial plant or the cost of production of the appliances of industry. From being a sporadic trait, of doubtful legitimacy, in the old days of the "natural" and "money" economy, the rate of profits or earnings on investment has in the nineteenth century come to take the central and dominant place in the economic system. Capitalization, credit extensions, and even the productiveness and legitimacy of any given employment of labor, are referred to the rate of earnings as their final test and substantial ground. At the same time the "ordinary rate of profits" has become a more elusive idea. The phenomenon of a uniform rate of profits determined by competition has fallen into the background and lost something of its matter-of-fact character since competition in the large industry has begun to shift from the position of a stable and continuous equilibration to that of an intermittent, convulsive strain in the service of the larger business men's strategy. The interest of the business community centres upon profits and upon the shifting fortunes of the profit-maker, rather than upon accumulated and capitalized goods. Therefore the ultimate conditioning force in the conduct and aims of business is coming to be the prospective profit-yielding capacity of any given business move, rather than the aggregate holdings or the recorded output of product.
But this latest development in the field of industrial business has not yet come to control the field. It is rather an inchoate growth of the immediate present than an accomplished fact even of the recent past, and it can be understood only by reference to those conditions of the recent past out of which it comes. Therefore it is necessary to turn back to a further consideration of the old-fashioned business traffic as it used to go on by the competitive method before the competitive order began seriously to be dislocated and take on an intermittent character, as well as to a consideration of that resort to credit which has, in large part, changed the competitive system of business from what it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century to what it has become at its close.
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