Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/201

 nomics is a science), we are also under this elementary obligation.

Much deadening socialistic legislation becomes unnecessary if communism is given its proper place in our unit of value (exactly as it is in the foot-pound-second, which must express all value before it attempts to measure part).

In considering the measurement of value we cannot escape communism first or last, and it seems far preferable to have it first and have done with it. Our Labor Unions which demand a larger number of units of value as fast as, or faster than, they deteriorate: our much reviled agricultural bloc, smarting under a system of taxation which makes a serf of the farmer: our socialists and single-taxers: our advocates of guilds and soviets: our Federal Reserve System with its bitterly contested and cautious extensions of value: Irving Fisher with his commodity unit which aims bravely, like a small-town emporium, at comprehensiveness—these, first or last, are all subconscious attempts at a necessary rectification of our notion of value.

We now thwart effort and defraud thrift by an irrelevant incompetent and material unit, and waste our time deploring bureaucratic interference.

Comprehensiveness we must have, either by pre-acceptance or costly adjustment. If we provide for basic equity at the outset we can thereafter delight ourselves with the profitable flow of untrammelled and highly differentiated individuality