Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/233

 at the door of our economic intelligence department which has failed to realize that a token of value which takes no cognisance of total value, or of taxation, the cost of maintaining value, has no place in democracy.

For the sake of sanity, let us get exact information before we push forward again to new confusion. Without some clear understanding it will be a farce to join any friendly international conference with all the old bludgeons of political-economy under our coats—and it will be suicide to go without them! We attained democracy itself long before we were individually aware of the difficulties of maintenance and the danger of deterioration, as may be seen by our records of crime and of illiteracy; and we have no justification as yet for moving forward. The basic trouble is not that democracy is a faulty institution, but that we have advanced enthusiastically guided by mob motives without any clear perception in economic terms of what we were repudiating. We have gained politically but suffered economically, largely because our apologetic economists, through the regime of autocracy and its transition into democracy, have been busy classifying and analyzing the products of a faulty and congested economic system. Their excuse may well be that they are looking at things as they are—not as they should be. This, though it is their proffered justification, is also their reproach. Things unfortunately are as they are—and, what is more serious, they are possibly worse than they were. If we do not get down to fundamentals there may well be more and more involved symptoms to classify, but all the time the patient will be no better off. Economics has become pure dialectic finesse: it is not science.

Our political-economists in the first place suffered us to enter a badly prepared camping ground; and there has been no scrutiny of the economic diseases we brought with us, or the new diseases arising from unhealthy conditions. As a consequence, we get long disconnected dissertations on poverty, on capital, on the probable future rates of interest, on bimetallism, on forms of currency, on the law of diminishing returns, and on ingenious and unjust taxation, however “practical,” based upon misplaced “faculty.”