Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/228

 could disentangle them from his criticism of our past stupidity.

To be explicit to the point of personalities, in countries such as Russia and Germany, only the deliberate creation of a scientific unit of value expressing the essential measurable components of basic value—the orderly duration of effort of a measurable population in a measurable area—can prevent final repudiation and economic chaos. This chaos, unfortunately, will probably result in the setting up of a new arbitrary “unit of value” doomed to gradual disintegration. In the past in many countries, including our own, this inevitable disintegration has been so slow that, like the aging of contemporaries, it has passed unnoticed. In our foolish youth the most serious of us sowed our wild oats and the crop is proving disappointing: we saved the dollar of our day which represented the surplus of a week of effort, and we find now that we have to pay it out for an hour’s work of a mechanic. The dollar has run down even faster than its owners. “Things are dearer,” we say, and sadly forego our just claim on freedom. Things are not dearer in terms of human effort; because of increased co-ordination and increased facilities they are less costly. The real grievance is that the so-called “gold” dollar is suffering from an imperceptible daily decline due to long years of inbreeding. To have seen the rouble buried, and to stand now at the death-bed of the mark, are economic lessons of which we should take full advantage. In spite of costly transfusions of value at the expense of the producer in periods of “deflation” our own currency is sinking just as surely. We sometimes fail to realize that mathematically, if we start anew every year, a ten per cent depreciation per annum can go on forever.

It is the smoothly-coated and undulating surface of our economic disorder that is misleading. We see the upturned strata of Russia and we are moved with pity or contempt instead of alarm. We are fools if we do not make a cross