Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/200

 is said by the gold-standardist about our fiat money at such a juncture; but an agent of the United States Treasury Department stands at the gangway of each outgoing steamer and makes the American citizen turn out his pockets—a naïve recognition of the fact that our token of value is more valuable than the value it is supposed to measure.

In dealing with the credit portion of our conglomerate currency we are plagued by market fluctuations part of the time (and have to throw the War Finance Corporation into the breach ), or we are plagued by the farmer all of the time, who quite properly contends that a liquid asset is not so very liquid when it is frozen.

Because we tie certificated value to one outworn arbitrary, gold, and to the modern arbitraries of bureaucratic discretion, we live under the never-ending confusion of subsequent legislative correction in the name of reform. What we now resent as communistic or socialistic legislation is the unconscious attempt of the injured to insist on cognisance being taken of total value since we have ignored communism, socialism, or comprehensiveness, whichever we care to call it, in our acknowledgment of effort—our measure of value and medium of exchange. Apart from scientific considerations, it is not even sportsmanlike to hold something out of the pledge of value which we tender for effort. There is no hope in such a method of ensuring the redemption of effort by equal effort; and to forestall revolt we are compelled to make good the deficiencies in our certified value by multitudinous laws. Our unit of partial value fails to represent the remainder of our total stream of value; and we are involved in endless adjustment. This is one side of the trouble: the other is that we allow even our partial value to be further dominated by a pure imperialistic tradition. We agree with autocratic principalities to measure economic value in terms of internationally owned gold; and our Navy has to stand by with banked fires.

From a scientific point of view a unit of value must be comprehensive in the fullest sense. It must express all before it can measure part. From an economic point of view (if eco-