Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/118

 worthless and primitive simple which should have gone down the well when the first spring water of democracy was piped into the house. To the engineer our dollar has about the same scientific sanction as the kilowatt-hour would have, if, after an exact measurement of volts and ohms and the resulting amperes, effective value per hour could be complacently altered by a transatlantic cable message between the semi-official agents of gold-standard principalities—and then frantically adjusted during a special session of Congress.

The problem of adequate remuneration involves chiefly the question of deferred payment—the settling of balances after an unequal exchange of effort—and the future recompense of that extra-effort which is vital to the community. The means of accomplishing these equities have grown immensely involved since they were deliberately set in reverse by autocracy, gathered up from the wreckage, still running, and utilized by democracy without suspicion.

To reconstruct the essential relationship between value, or orderly freedom, and valid currency, let us go back to simpler times.

Before there were any conventional tokens of value to assist exchange, such as currency—that is, before there was any well-disciplined trust in princes, or any organized community good faith—there was still in process, exactly as there is now, a constant exchange of current labor and goods. At that stage of economic development—the stage of trade, or barter—it is easy to realize that the total sum of skins, flints and forest produce made up the total sum of materialized effort—or wealth—and this total was itself their cumbersome currency. The power of demand was the total sum of goods not required for immediate consumption—provided always that someone else desired them. This total, as today, was a product of effort, in the medium of matter—less the incalculable demands of the tax collector—a partial product, not a factor. But the economists of those days had more excuse for loose thinking than we, for they had no conception that the cost of order is a factor of value; they had not thought about time; they had some reprehensible habits in regard to human effort—taking a slave when