Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/105

 Both the so-called destructive and productive processes of nature are, under a larger view, no more than rearrangement: they are material modifications of our environment. The enrichments upon which we draw so lavishly are unmeasurable changes of environment; and their apparent depletion faces us more and more grimly as we exhaust our fisheries, our lumber, our oil, coal, nitrates, potash and phosphates, to say nothing of other groupings of elements to which we have grown used—and yet these very things, as consumed, have been the agents of our emancipation and their depletion seems likely to be the spur to greater emancipation. As certain commodities appear to approach exhaustion, just as free land was exhausted, or as capital has been momentarily exhausted in warring countries, we alter our plans. Destruction or reconstruction—both of these are plainly rearrangements of environment; but we are slowly being brought face to face with the fact that land-area, current population and current time are the only factors upon which we can depend for our basic calculations. Without knowing it, in our economic methods we are mentally living on our hump, like a camel, but it is not a basis for calculation that will carry us anywhere. If we employ such accumulations as factors with which to measure value, we are in the position of an engineer who arranges a hydro-electric plant on the basis of the water that can be drawn out of a mountain lake through a certain sized pipe in one year. What he actually does, instead, is to disregard the intermediate reservoir, knowing that it may be exhausted by a period of extra demand, and he estimates the amount of water flowing into that lake: he values it in terms of density, volume and velocity, and it is on these figures alone he bases the capacity of his power-plant and the scope of his distribution.

Time, then, is not a whimsical and intangible gift of the Creator’s without shape or form; it is a rational means of measuring the duration of normal human effort—an available factor to be treated with mystic awe or disrespect individually, but which cannot be disregarded in any basic conception of value which recognizes effort, and deals mathematically with taxation, wages, rent, interest or delayed ex-