Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/120

 The queen was in the parlor Eating bread and honey.”

With the royal domination of land area there came also an added opportunity to dominate labor by serfdom, and to appropriate all surplus effort.

The commencement of the gulf between the controller of land-area and the individual exerter of effort could not be more simply illustrated, nor could the modern tax-collector (who makes his demand on visible need and activity) be better pictured than by the blackbird in his vicious assault on labor.

What had happened was that the national economic system was at last politically enclosed, and the living force to be measured and utilized—human effort—was capable of being read by a gauge. It was no longer necessary to estimate it by the length of the driver’s whip: it was no longer necessary to do as we do today—harass and discourage it at every point and measure it by the intensity of its protest; and it was certainly no longer necessary to measure it by little pieces of gold which we have to borrow at times on ruinous terms from private or alien owners. From that time on, the pressure of population upon land-area in a given time was capable of scientifically measuring value, whether present or future. Extra effort could be exerted and stored up, and its value accurately measured in the gauge of census-area-hours. There should be no further need to guess at its value, as we do today, and subsequently suffer at frequent intervals from our over-estimates or our under-estimates. Mentally, in our economic methods, we wander aimlessly back to the meandering and unconfined headwaters of human energy and guess what the value amounts to in terms of gold, ignoring the simple scientific factors of value.