The Sentinel=record., 1913-12-28
COST OF LIVING
 UNDER DISCUSSION
ILLINOIS COLLEGE PRESIDENT SAYS PAST PUBLIC DEBT AND
 FUTURE THE CAUSE.
Declares We Are Paying for Dinners Eaten in the Past as We'll as in the Future.

Minneapolis, Minn., Dec. 27.-1he overhead charges of the eapitalistic system are the cause of the increased cost of living. according to the ad- dress today of Dean Albion w. Small of the University of Chicago, to the twenty-sixth annual meeting of the American Economic Association. Dean Small is president of the Amer ican Sociological Society, meeting with the Economic Association.
 Our inqurfy into the central prob lens of our time will amount to nothing" said Dean Small, "until the leaders of our thought and action consent 70 a policy of candid and thorough inquiry as to whether there is something radically mistaken in the capitalistic system itself.
 When we are paving for today's dinner we are paying also for dinners served and paid for long ago and We are also paying installments on other dinners that will be served generations hence. Yet we marvel at the growing size of the bill.
 We are still paying interest on s441 100000 of national debt incurred before 1865. Interest payments al ready have equaled the original loans twice over. Through continuance of the annual interest payments which do no. reduce the principal we arc now discharging these loans a third time. Americans for the next fifty years will be paying interest for DOT | that time will have repaid the orig inal borrowings, but the principal and | interest still will be just as much due as if no payments had been made. Improvements of railroad termfn- als completed or projected in vari- ous cities are bonded for $100,000, ,000. The interest will be a permanent charge upon the earnings. It will press down upon wages and lift de- mands for higher rates. Our indus tries will repay these loans over and over again to the children and the children's children of the original | lenders"
 Dean Small, describing functional fallacies that radically ignore social efficiency" pointed to:
 'The fallacy of treating capital as if it were an active agent and Of crediting income to the personal rep resentative of capital irrespective of their actual services.
 "The falacy of incorporating the fallacious capitalistic principle, thus promoting the legal person to immor- tality. el
 ''TNNe fallacy of system of inher- itance which assigns the powers and privileges of incorporated capital 70 sentimentally designed individuals. This creates economic Sovereignty which eventually must become more intolerabIe than the predatory politi- cal sovereignties overthrown by rev. olution'
 "A warning as to corrective meas ures was voiced at The same session of the two organizations by David Kinley, president of the American Economic Association.
 The speaker said that the attitude of the courts toward the character of acts of corporations needed read justment. There is demand, he said, that personal responsibility for corporate acts shall be fixed upon the officers of corporations in such a way as to prevent the recurrence of many of the evils that have given rise to the hostility toward corporations.
 The meeting will continue over Tuesday. Railroad rate making with an address by B. 1T. Meyer of the In terstate Commerce Commission, syn dicalism and the economic effect of supreme court dissolutions are sub jects schedulede.