Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/142

 exactly what a scientific measure of value must still be today—a measure of freedom, not freedom × $100⁄243$&thinsp;. It also, as the economists properly contend, must be redeemable—but in freedom, which is possible, not in gold, which is mathematically impossible.

We know this: our official conception of money, our measure of value and medium of exchange—the inducement of effort and the key to freedom—still takes its bearings from the gold standard, whether the angle of departure is 30, 40 or 80 degrees. In economics, the science responsible for the measurement of liberated human effort, we still hold religiously to gold as the only tangible token of value, quite unconcerned by the fact that it bears no relation to this effort, or to the time and area that define it.

As a matter of fact all our economic tradition is international, and being international is necessarily more political than scientific. If value is in any way due to order, and if national conceptions of order vary, a unit of value that has international scope and can traverse different mediums at the same velocity must possess some remarkable inherent qualities. If such a thing exists it is well worthy of our worship. But it does not exist. It is sheer delusion. We might just as well take an alarm-clock to Mars to get us up in time for sunrise.

Internationally, the best we have in gold today is an emasculated arbitrary exiled in the United States; and it is emasculated not only because men are blindly striving toward a larger and juster conception of value and freedom through such schemes as the Federal Reserve System, the minimum wage, single-tax and Professor Irving Fisher’s commodity unit, but because the one almost royal quality of gold has been impaired by the cyanide process, by tube-milling, by dredging and by multitudinous spurious tokens which pretend to represent it. Safely housed in New York and badly shaken, it still petulantly asserts to solemn regents (who couch these irrational demands in royal form), its right to dominate economic value—and the human effort and freedom so disastrously involved.