Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/232

 useless to arbitrate baseless ritual and superstition. Such a gesture may be made without any flavor of animosity, and quite suitably, for the challenger perchance may not survive the ensuing conflict, even if he is successful in provoking it. Between the gesture and the conflict the instigator should admit his own weakness, assert his beliefs and with perfect propriety, in the face of possible annihilation, indicate his hopes, since, if he succumb, nobody much cares, and, if he survive, there is always more to be said.

In the first place it is a great pity that the gesture of attack was necessary; let that be taken for granted and the gesture forgiven. It is not in any way the reputation of the ritualist that is at stake, but the honor of economics.

The challenge to the political-economist takes this form: “You have failed to realize that, in a region of self-imposed order such as democracy, value and freedom are identical; and in using privately controlled factors, such as land-value and capital, expressed in terms of gold, to measure value you are ignoring the basic conditions of your problem. Your factors themselves are not measurable: you cannot co-ordinate them nor show any integral relationship between your phenomena. You may be historians, evangelists, philosophers, reformers or incendiaries—but you are not scientists.”

Now let us see if this position is not fully justified: first preparing ourselves for defense, and then, if this can be successfully maintained, pressing the attack.

Autocracy, in such a form as made sound economics high-treason, has gone in this country—we abandoned it and pushed forward to a new objective which we call democracy; but we did this without any diagnosis in economic terms of our previous ailments; just as some propose to push forward again toward internationalism without any attempt to consolidate our gains and with all our economic rearguard problems unconsidered. Our political-economists, who should have constituted our intelligence department, have, until now, contented themselves with an elaborate, skilful and highly technical analysis of our confusion, often blaming industrialism or capital or labor. Now none of these is to blame. Our confusion lies