Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/128

 fall together nationally, instead of maintaining as we do now a continual fratricidal economic war within our boundaries.

The political-economists, wrestling with disconcerting political arbitraries, saw money in its relation to a limited supply of gold which because of its original scarcity, acted as a check to irresponsible action, or they think of it in relation to goods, the wasting product of effort, or to manual labor, the least valuable form of effort. The curious aspect of their endeavors, from a scientific point of view, is that while they have struggled vainly to determine the total volume of national value in terms of an indeterminable unit of value, it apparently has not occurred to them that their unit might be determined by the total sum of national value.

As suggested vaguely by others, Professor Irving Fisher, with all the painstaking method of the scientist, proposes as a remedial adjustment to employ the fluctuating demand for commodities as a basis of value. Now if it were possible to hold taxation and rent under scrutiny, to gauge accurately the value of physical and mental labor, and to fully disclose the total available quantity of goods desired, then, with calculable taxation and with rents, wages and professional fees controlled by law, the retail price of finished commodities might be a fair index of the whole population’s informed demand. Such intelligent demand would undoubtedly be a clew to value. His method assumes a vague relationship between uninformed demand and unknown supply; but since the demand may be thwarted and the supply suddenly contracted or expanded, the relationship he proposes to use is at the best a measure of material value, vitiated by several unknown factors. Only measurable supply adequately coupled with measurable demand (or measurable flow, which is the same thing) can be employed to determine economic value, and if we are to measure supply or demand, or the consequent flow, we must have something comprehensive to measure them with.

Fisher makes an ingenious attempt to measure one vital factor—population—by its grosser appetites. Why not measure population directly? The many subtle forms of rent, the