Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/100

 is recorded on our tombstones, and there is no guesswork about that.

The so-called “increment” of time is constant, and in an ideal community, where equities are observed, should measure a general dividend available in proportion to our capacity to co-ordinate ourselves, though it is obvious that we grant this dividend at present as a kind of riparian right to the holders of thickly-populated land-area, without assessing pro rata responsibility. These beneficiaries in turn are raided at intervals by the international owners of massed gold—our disastrous fetish.

It has not been customary to regard time as an essential factor by which to measure economic value, and yet it is so clearly a definite limit that it seems almost foolish to set seriously about establishing the validity of its mathematical claim. If any basic calculations are to be attempted, it is fatuous to ignore it: neither resistance, duration of effort, nor interest, which expresses effective current value, can be determined except by employing the factor of time. Just as effective heat, electricity and weight in motion are measured respectively in calories per hour, kilowatt-hour or foot-pound-seconds, so interest, the current value of freedom, can only be measured in population-area-hours. It is worthy of note that as engineers make their tentative contributions to economics, they cannot speak of effort apart from time as a basic factor of value. They, at any rate, trained to reason quantitatively, cannot think of labor, or human effort, in any terms whatever without introducing the factor of time. They seem, however, to miss an equally important point by failing to realize that the area in which effort is exerted is just as necessary a factor of measurement as the time in which it is exerted.

The basic character of time as a factor of value is one of the elementary economic truths which has been approached so closely by economists from different starting points that the marvel is they never seized and harnessed it. Henry George, in apologetically justifying interest to his