Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/22

 technique of economics. Political-economy recognized that we were stiff with bandages and bore much the same relation to economics that an advertisement for embrocation bears to anatomy. The political-economist, however, is fully warranted, today, in turning his attention to the international field where he may study the effect of political motives upon the logical consequences of economic law, since, internationally, arbitrary barriers to free flow are still sanctioned. As long as we and other nations are interested in economic preserves, so long will it be necessary to have well-armed gamekeepers and so long will it be impossible to measure values by the logical flow of unimpeded human effort in a measurable zone of order.

Within the boundaries of democracy, what is now called the “Science of Economics,” owing to the coercive (or purely short-sighted) policies of multitudinous state-bureaus, is again political-economy and is dismal because it is hopelessly incoherent. Ely recognizes this renewed misalliance with a note which is somewhere between acquiescence and satisfaction, when he states: “But in treating economics in connection with ethics and politics, the older writers were merely following an instinctive method of dealing with economic truths to which in a certain degree later writers are returning.” It may seem a little unkind to mention it, but there can be nothing either ethical or politic about a science.

The rational science of economics—the measuring of the value of liberated human effort within definite limits, and the consequent identification of costly friction—has not, apparently, been presented, or conceived, as a whole. Much of the available data has been ably assembled; but if there has been any attempt to show the possibility of correlating such data, as in any other science dealing with the measurement of energy, it is difficult to discover, or to discover any trace of its influence.

Why, unless there is some basic confusion in the so-called science of economics, does everyone but a professional economist shy from it, unless it is that thinking men instinctively