Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/135

 faith; but if we recognize simultaneously the good faith of the citizen landholder and the citizen bank-depositor, and take both steps at the same time, so that the moment the responsibility was imposed upon the control of value, that value became fully disclosed and a final basis of currency, we might find that the protest would diminish. For those other citizens who had never looked forward to the exercise of domination without contingent responsibility, and who had not unduly exerted their effort for a currency that could halve its value in a few years, there would be the encouragement of having the responsibility of taxation removed from want and activity, where we place it at present, and of remuneration being integrally related to basic economic value, so that it might be always capable of standing up against increasing pressure, and worth saving for future use, instead of being found debased or spurious at some critical juncture. The practical application of the theory would mean simply this: to the owner of land-area, we would say: “If we are prepared to throw off nationally the debased tradition of a gold-standard of value, you will then hold control of value. This we recognize as the proper reward of your past effort. We shall measure this in terms of total basic value so that you may be held responsible, but such measurement will have nothing to do with special values due to past effort, neither will it be a prejudiced personal guess: it will simply be the local census-area value of your land; and in certifying this value we shall also see that it becomes immediately the effective basis of currency.”

To the man who holds our present currency like a kite in a gusty wind, we would say: “You now hold negotiable tokens of fluctuating value; we shall honor these by exchanging them for a pledge of unimpairable basic value.”

To the man who held neither control of basic value nor fluctuating “value” in the form of our present currency, we would say, “You are no longer to be taxed for effort or need, and for your surplus effort you shall have a pledge of underlying economic value which cannot be repudiated or debased.”

Since what is proposed is to divorce our national measure of economic value from the confusing reactions due to alien