Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/134

 ''which, at any given moment, expresses the value of this effort due to the national desire of freedom and the national conception of order. This resultant, which is the occupancy-value of national area, may be regarded as national economic unity, and can then be employed as a scientific measure of value, any fractional part of which will remain relatively constant in area and time.''

It is perhaps almost too much to hope that this theory will be immediately self-evident: our minds are dulled by very respectable delusion: our affairs at present are in no way ordered in conformity with it; and the difficulty of making any change in a convention without injuring the individual acts as a bar to mental readjustment. There is, however, this to work upon: Our present conception of value, our present methods of taxation and our present international basis for national currency, are all so archaic and arbitrary that they are not giving very great satisfaction. Any proposed alteration in either currency or taxation arouses the protests of those who are fortunately able at the moment “to let well-enough alone.” There is, however, some hope held out in this theory which is not offered separately by either the tax-specialist or the currency-specialist: if we make taxation directly proportional to the control of basic value and stop there, we could anticipate a perfectly proper protest from those who have exchanged their labor for this control of value in good faith and are afraid of some disastrous shift; if we make currency directly representative of basic value and stop there, we could anticipate an equally vigorous protest from our discreet international overlords who almost unconsciously manipulate our present so-called values to their own advantage, and also from those who might fear even more rapid debasement than we now suffer of a currency for which they have exchanged their labor in good