Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/16

 intervals in miles. To have seen the “fabricated captain” of a United States Shipping Board vessel permitting his sailors to recline in deck chairs and farm out the work of swabbing decks to native muchachos in the port of Cebu; to have seen markets for produce established in remote islands, the inhabitants of which practiced communism and were accustomed to be swept by famine, and to witness the development of a sense of property-rights and a prompt demand for barbed wire; to have seen the end of a century-long factional guild-war in China, and an immediate drop in the quality of the non-competitive output, following the practical establishment of a monopoly; to see at home, the American dairyman, as a producer of milk, cheerfully buying foreign oil-cake instead of American grain; and, as a manufacturer of butter, fighting bitterly against the importation of the oil expressed from this cake; and to have seen the American grain farmer, during the last few years, driven steadily into debt through indirect taxation, and hesitating over the cost of his pipe tobacco;—all these things are valid economic data, which must be taken into consideration in the formulation of any rational economic theory.

From the impersonal standpoint of science, all economic logic, since the advent of representative government, has been vitiated by one elementary mathematical error: it has not yet been clearly realized that economic value has an essential inverse component.

It is, therefore, impossible to construct a scientific measure of value until this inverse component—the cost of overcoming resistance—can be mathematically included in our calculations.

If this contention is correct (and it would be sheer impudence to put it forward to any scientist other than an economist), then a host of so-called political complications can be removed from economics; and it is on this one contention that the following contribution to economic theory stands or falls.

San Francisco, April,