Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/136

 or irresponsible control, the most intelligent and significant protest to emerge will come from those whose present unseen, and often unconscious advantage is disclosed—not from the banker, who renders vital service, nor from the manufacturer who is equally essential, but from a small group of “citizens of the world” who are in many cases semi-official representatives of crowned and uncrowned alien powers. These move with dignity and discretion from point to point, wherever in their international empire their ghostly services are most needed during periods of panic and depression. Today, successors in title to factories, tomorrow to land, and in due course to insurance companies, railroads and ships, but never abandoning their first call upon the massed gold which is our bastard standard of value and which we fondly delude ourselves is our property available to redeem our tokens.

It will be realized very clearly that our present economic scheme does not comply with a dynamic theory; for while it is beginning to be felt that national control of value may be vested in the land-owner, the sum of the negotiable tokens of basic value, which we call currency, bears no integral relation to that value. Our tokens are subject to disastrous fluctuations which appear uncontrollable owing to the intervention of an alien and arbitrary factor; while taxation is imposed, not primarily in proportion to the logical control of value through land-ownership, but subsequently on the vulnerable flanks of effort—need and activity—thus debasing our tokens still further.

It is not democracy that is to blame for this; democracy is the logical outcome of our belated decision to divide political power equally—a saving step from insecurity to firm ground. The cause of our confusion is that, so far, under democracy we have devised no scientific means of measuring anything exactly, and have dealt with actual or economic power only as it crowded us into a corner. We have not realized that taxation, interest and ground-rent are calculably related to total national economic value, if we can only lay down the foundations of just measurement by devising an unimpairable unit.

Land-area, population and time—these are the only measur-