Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/227

 is an essential condition and that human freedom is the final phase. In due course, in every intelligently-organized area, steps will be taken to ensure a maximum output of advantageous effort for the sake of a maximum flow of value and a maximum enjoyment of individual freedom. As soon as this logical sequence is realized, men will insist upon the employment of a comprehensive unit of value, so that the confident exchange of services, or economic flow, may be made feasible, and taxation will be devised to provide for order and common facilities without checking effort. The ancient brakes will be stripped from the dynamos, friction will be eliminated from the conductors, and the flow of value will respond. The same laws will then be found to apply in each of these many areas of differing political complexion; and as local prejudice disappears and the last echoes of misleading tradition die out, area after area will unquestionably be linked up to mutual advantage. One after another, nation will be joined to nation by joint interest, and we shall gain the benefits dreamed of now by those who would mix them with the pestle and mortar of politics.

In the meantime, irrespective of international suspicions, it will be found that any national area, freed from the economic friction of arbitrary taxation and possessing a scientific unit of value and medium of exchange, will accelerate its production and be capable of rapidly attaining a position where just debts can be paid or foreign products purchased if permitted politically. And whatever the present currency of these areas, whether roubles, marks, francs, pounds or dollars, just as soon as these aimless tokens are converted into census-area units of definite national value, and put beyond the pressure of circumstances or the manipulation of well-meaning chancellors, production of value will commence anew.

Unwarranted optimism is most dangerous; but if there were known to exist in any power-plant—not excluding the United States—a ratio of friction to free flow as great as our present economic practices make unavoidable, the prognostications of the most cold-blooded scientist would sound optimistic, if we