Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/222

 losses controlled, have we come to the end of our troubles? Not unless we are vigilant.

The demagogue is poaching on the preserves of his masters even now and is counting on taking the place of them all when democracy has patiently plugged the last old leak. While he clamors for vague and windy enlargements of our token of value, at the same time he proposes shamelessly to employ taxation, the still more disreputable tool of our deposed tyrants, to thwart every possible attempt at exerting individual effort.

Human effort allowed free play till it comes to fruition and the whole handsome increment safely caught where it can be measured: neither baron, king, priest or financier had ever such an opportunity as this to make the mouth water.

As with the swept and garnished house, our last state may well be worse than the first. The old dangers are becoming fairly evident; but the new danger which awaits us is in dubitably the bureaucratic demagogue with his conscious lust for self-perpetuating power, and his skilful play upon the desires of a large body of premature citizens with their in satiable appetite for what is termed the unearned increment whenever it appears sufficiently tempting.

It would be wiser to go down fighting as individualists than to surrender the control of this slender fund of surplus effort to the community, in any loot-fed frenzy of so-called reform.

A tax on land with its “unearned” increment of the effort of the past years is tinctured with the lure of loot, and is commended or condemned as the various interests are affected, but a tax on census-area alone has some parallel features. Both give rise to the serious possibility of a type of economic communism which will result in the affluent leadership of those who promise most largely to unwilling labor the distribution through taxation of the fruits of individuality. For a brief period, as in Russia and in parts of Mexico, the community would live upon the slender reserves of extra-effort till these became exhausted and there ensued the primitive reactions of despair. The natural remedy for this danger—the social antitoxin which automatically develops—is that if the least worthy body of citizens demand year by year, through taxa-