Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/24

 strike the orthodox as unprofessional, since detail is eliminated as far as possible, and an effort has been made to avoid technicalities. An attempt has also been made to gain some advantage by endeavoring to keep the auditors awake, though this the orthodox may regard as hardly ethical.

The program followed is designed to show that all our conceptions of value were logically “faulted” by the movement which we called revolution, and which we misguidedly thought was emancipation. We moved, unfortunately, in mass, without much rearrangement of our economic strata.

The salient points are as follows:

&ensp;A brief survey is made of the confusion of democracy, which is still governed by the short-sighted desires of various strongly-organized political groups. Owing to a lack of any scientific conception of measurement, democracy has not reformulated the tentative economic laws put forward by the unfortunate political-economist in the days when it was illegal to think that kings might be an incubus:

&ensp;Consideration is next given to the apparent conflict of interest between the community and the individual—the community being concerned with order and general facilities, the prerequisites of value, and the individual with personal freedom (the logical consequence of liberated effort in a region of order), which is value itself:

&ensp;Upon the assumption that an unimpairable pledge, or token, of value is an essential inducement of effort, a search is conducted for the measurable limits of value, so that the causes for the continual diminishment of our present unit may be discerned and dealt with:

&ensp;An examination is made of the fundamental significance of the words “order” and “value” which, in economics (not in physics), we have continued to employ very lightly since we broke away from a system in which both order and value were spoon-fed to the simple-minded subject:

&ensp;A momentary (and possibly useless) protest is ventured against the deplorable custom of hurling standardized economic epithets at any emergence of reason:

&ensp;An uncompromising stand has been taken against our