Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/115

 the economists assert, is fundamentally a study of the measurement of value.

Value is directly proportionate to effort and inversely proportionate to resistance. It should be obvious, therefore, that unless effort and the equilibrium which must be overcome can be definitely pre-stated in common terms there is no calculable value for the economist to deal with. A unit of economic value subject to retroactive depreciation by a tax on ice cream cones and women’s hats makes calculations very complicated.

This anywhere but in the economic field would be a platitude; but in the mechanics of democracy it should take the same rank as one of the elementary rules of engineering: that if you diminish flow or introduce friction, you proportionately reduce effective energy. Unimpairable remuneration, the guaranty of freedom, is inducement: inducement governs effective effort; and the maximum expression of individual human effort is our economic goal.

Now if inducement is impaired, and if rewards are allotted to idleness, it is obvious that friction has been introduced, and value diminished.

The whole question of inducement is vital to democracy, for having freed individual effort, and having done away with autocratic control, we must leave the pressure of necessity to attend to reluctant effort and employ the inducement of adequate reward to encourage willing effort. The pressure of necessity—the drive of circumstance—ceases to function as soon as the immediate menace to physical freedom is over—effort and resistance balance, and there is no effective surplus. The inducement of reward—the lure of circumstance—is all that the community can depend upon for its reserves. It is not then merely a moral duty to see that remuneration maintains its relative integrity: it is vital to the existence of the community. If there are any citizens willing to create a surplus, they must be encouraged and protected; and if at the period of their extra-effort they do not require either goods or services, we