The different interests of producers and consumers can come into collision with one another, and although the correct relation, on the whole, establishes itself of its own accord, the equalization still needs a regulation, consciously undertaken, that stands above both. The right to such a regulation, for particular cases (for example, the setting of prices for articles of the most common necessities of life), lies in this: that, through the public exhibition of goods that are of quite general, everyday use, these are offered not so much to an individual as such, but to him as universal, to the public — whose right not to be defrauded, and the inspection of goods, as a common business, can be represented and attended to by a public power. — But it is chiefly the dependence of great branches of industry on external circumstances and remote combinations — which the individuals tied and bound to those spheres cannot survey in their connection — that makes a general oversight and direction necessary.

Opposed to the freedom of trade and commerce in civil society is the other extreme: the provisioning, as well as the determination, of the labour of all through public arrangement — as, for instance, also the ancient labour on the pyramids and the other enormous Egyptian and Asiatic works, which were produced for public purposes without the mediation of the labour of the individual through his own particular arbitrary will and particular interest. This [latter] interest invokes that freedom against higher regulation, but, the more blindly it is absorbed in the self-seeking purpose, the more it needs such regulation, in order to be led back to the universal, and in order to shorten and mitigate the dangerous convulsions, and the duration of the interval, in which the collisions are supposed to be equalized by way of unconscious necessity.