Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/168

 condemn everything that does not harmonize with their petty and bigoted little system.”

If the “one element of justice” should be precision, then the application of all scientific method to the measurement of value is, unfortunately, both “petty and bigoted.”

A valid currency is a measure of value: it is contended here that value is freedom: neither freedom nor value has any precision except in a definite zone of self-imposed order. It should follow, therefore, that the sacrifice or cost, which we call taxation, involved in the maintenance of order for the insurance of value, or freedom, must also be brought to focus in any unit designed to measure basic value.

The same conception holds good if we take a very general view of the situation and employ political terms. We can conceive sheer freedom, or anarchy, modified advantageously by the maintenance of self-imposed order, giving us as a net resultant a condition which is nothing more or less than what we call proudly—with excellent reason—democracy. But we are more proud than practical.

If anarchy, modified by self-imposed order, results in measurable freedom or economic value, then just as the foot-pound-second is a focal image of our cruising world with all the saving restraints of the solar system, so our scientific unit of economic value must be a miniature representative of sheer freedom modified similarly by the saying restraints of order that give rise to economic value. If our unit is sufficiently comprehensive, and on this condition only, we can then take order, of the particular type we prefer nationally, for granted.

To contend that there must be an integral relationship between our token of value and our system of taxation may seem very far-fetched to the gold-standardist, and yet if we could put him on the witness-stand under extended cross-examination we should find him belligerently supporting this contention in the end. If, as an expert witness, we permitted him first to expound his theory of value, and then excused him for awhile to prepare his bibliography, as though he were closing a chap-