Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/210

 under the necessity of reserving something substantial to meet a desire which seeks gratification without exertion, he deals very arbitrarily with certain forms of capital, against which he has no logical grievance. Such of it as can be separated from land by his single master-stroke he is willing to concede is stored effort, but that other effort which, like a blood-offering, has enhanced the value of land, fails to receive his sanction and is to be placed, together with the land which it has enriched, upon the auction block and sold for the benefit of the state. In his effort to prove that capital in no case advances wages to labor (Chapter ), he virtually repudiates all stored effort (or capital) unfortunately so involved in land. Government bonds he also very largely places in this category, implying that such obligations, entered into for the sake of a community, as in warfare, are spurious tokens of wealth, and should be so regarded. They may not represent material wealth, but may represent value, since value in reality is freedom. No matter who started the quarrel, some conception of freedom is usually what a democracy fights for, so that his questioning of the “value” of such obligations at least conforms to his primary law—“That men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.”

While there is a persistent response to the doctrines of single tax and socialism which is well worthy of consideration, yet there is an equally significant antipathy to any immediate application of these doctrines. These conflicting emotions are due in each case to our healthy reaction from a proposal to erect a formal structure of beautiful proportions upon the untested foundation of altruism. Our fundamental desire of freedom—even of ampler freedom—is not a virtue, it is a blind passion in which the element of blindness, up to the present, has been the distinguishing feature.