Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/237

 firmed by our growing realization that, in a well-organized self-governing community, less bullion money is required as good faith grows: we tend to acknowledge as negotiable all jointly-guaranteed tokens of economic value underwritten by the state, looking instinctively to their ultimate vindication and redemption through belated taxation: but this system, owing to lack of scruple and lack of intelligence in high places, and owing to the fact that our tokens of value are still supposed to be redeemable in an internationally controlled commodity, gold, gives rise to disastrous inflation and deflation, followed by intolerable punitive taxation. The measure of total economic value having no pretense at clean definition, the temptation is too great to play with an alleged percentage of an unknown fund. Instruments of credit represent trust: this trust is the very flower of all the idealism of democracy; but it should represent trust in an honest measurement of ultimate limits, not trust in a well-meaning guess which is exposed at regular intervals to brutal disillusionment. The trust in our non-fluctuating, and cleanly-measurable, factor of land-area as affected by the orderly effort of a measurable population is trust enough, and is much better justified than trust in an unscientific hazard as to the value of fluctuating factors measured in terms of gold which does not exist. Since our gold certificates cannot be redeemed when due they are renewed, and we get in consequence a viciously accelerating levy on need and activity. The use of bullion represents our old mistrust of arbitraries and the very natural fear of repudiation. And yet, long after there is no mathematical possibility of anything but repudiation, indefinite postponement or chaos, so diseased are our minds by tradition and ritual, that we waive the test and submit ourselves to the continuing domination of a delusion.

There is no occasion to flatter ourselves in this matter with foolish self-congratulation that our dollar is the only currency which has maintained its integrity in the long-protracted crisis of the war and its consequences. It has not. As a matter of record the United States Dollar stood below par in Spain and Holland. The only difference between our currency kite with its light tail of bullion, and that of many other countries, with