Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/178



Professor Irving Fisher, in attempting to counteract the vagaries of the dollar, sets a varying weight of gold against a fixed quantity of goods. In doing this he is obviously committed to some conception of value which he tries to approximate. If this clew is followed, it becomes apparent that his sympathetic gold dollar is an assortment of essential commodities which will give the owner a definite measure of bodily freedom. But freedom can be measured much more exactly in terms of its limits; and since the ultimate measurable control-factor of freedom or value is land-area, and this factor must appear in every basic calculation involving commodities, the attempt to approximate value by a limited group of commodities is a belated adjustment, far from fundamental.

It is interesting to speculate what would have happened during the period of the war if we had been employing Fisher’s unit. With rising prices we would have been given an increasing quantity of gold in our dollar, but rents in many cases rose even faster than commodity prices; the cost of immediate personal services which are not promptly reflected in the wholesale price of goods, such as those of the domestic servant, the plumber and the dentist, also rose through demand; and our medley of taxes on the services of the retailer fell on the consumer, so that while the usual proportion of the dollar set aside for food and clothes would have been adequate, the proportion set aside for rent, services and taxes would have been inadequate and we would have found that we had to part with some of our goods to meet these intervening charges. In spite of Fisher’s ingenious attempt to escape the domination of our gold convention, his calculations would be vitiated by erratic and gusty taxation, and we would be brought face to face with a more basic domination—namely the control of land-area, which would have to be dealt with by legislation for the purpose of standardizing rents, driving us back to the necessity of measuring the occupancy-value of area, or population-density. This should be done first instead of last, just as the cost of overcoming basic resistance must be measured first instead of last, if we are to have a scientific and unimpairable unit of value.