32 AN ECONOMIST'S PROTEST: 1915—IV 
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alleged by these modern improvers on Bastiat, that it ““ ensures 
the distribution of the ‘available supplies to those who are willing 
to pay most, i.e., presumably to those who have the greatest 
need,” they are even more at sea. No one ever before claimed 
hat, as a universal or even a general rule, the higher the price 
of a commodity, the more it is distributed in proportion to needs. 
f oranges were a shilling each, they would only be distributed 
0 the rich, like pine-apples now, “ because the poor could not 
afford to pay the prices demanded,” to use the Committee’s 
own words. Who, before the Committee, ever supposed that this 
would be distribution “to those who have the greatest need ” ? 
Does Marshall never take any notice of the inequality of wealth, 
and the consequent absence of correspondence between greatness 
of need and greatness of purchasing power ¢ Do all teachers of 
elementary economics ignore it ? The Committee might as well 
report that the rise of water in the short arm of a siphon indicates 
the plain fact ” that the law of gravity has “ broken down in 
he extraordinary circumstances of the present winter.” The 
offect of the rise of price on the distribution of the amount avail- 
able is well uuderstood to be different in the case of different 
commodities, with different elasticities of demand on the part 
of different classes, and often varies with the magnitude of the 
change of price. A big rise in the price of bread probably leaves 
the proportions consumed by rich and poor pretty much as it 
was; a big rise in the price of oranges would give them all to 
the rich. Coal is a commodity of which a large part is a 
‘ necessary ” to all classes, and another large part a “ luxury ”’ 
of the rich, upon which they spend a quite appreciable portion 
of their means. It seems at any rate probable that a big rise 
in the price of London coal in consequence of a failure of supply 
uts down the luxurious consumption of the rich by a larger 
rercentage than it cuts down the consumption of the poor : the 
rich take much less coal, the poor take only a little less ; the rich 
spend much the same money as before, or not much more ; the 
poor spend an amount nearly as much increased as the price. 
The poor are less hit by any given deficiency in the supply of 
a commodity like this than they are by the same deficiency of 
a commodity like bread, in which there is little luxurious con- 
sumption by the rich (such as there is being waste by servants), 
and consequently little help from the reduction of that con: