Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/111

 illogical to link the value arising from free individual effort either wholly or fractionally, to gold, any portion of which is held on deposit in this country by an irresponsible and alien government or its semi-official agents.

The area of land is vital because it cannot be suddenly duplicated or withdrawn. All other so-called “land-values” may be substituted for, duplicated or exhausted, and represent the humus of dead years. Because of the finality of the land-area factor within the boundaries of democracy, it is capable of dominating effort and its control today would be actual sovereignty if it were not for our erratic taxation and the unscientific gold-standard tradition. Individual sovereignty, however, it must not be forgotten, is what each of us wants for himself. It is what we have been calling freedom.

Here we depart apparently from physical parallels for a moment because we are dealing with a phase of energy lacking conventional phraseology, but in physics a force does make the effort of which it is capable: ethics, if the effort is beneficent, says that it should: and law, when it finally speaks, says that it must. Only with power and responsibility definitely coupled, is there any assurance of value or freedom.

Ethics (which is the anti-friction compound of the human power-plant), gives us the law that power and responsibility are complementary, and from ethics it should be a very short step into law and politics; but while the approach to law can be made easily, we find often that we have to walk a great way back along a regrettable crevasse to reach political territory.

In law it is covered by many enactments, the laws of trustee ship and guardianship being the most simple. We can step across the crevasse between ethics and politics on the meeting ground of employers’-liability, however inequitably drafted that law has been in various places. In practical politics we have to go far further back than democracy itself for a clear sight of it; but if we stop a moment to consider, we find the natural law automatically operative in that we suffer the con-