Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/250

 exerted, and making use of these he devises a constant unit of value, or least common denominator, mathematically related to these limits. He then works back toward a precise characterization of any obstacles, with a view to their removal, and later to logical prediction of advantageous products.

Bondage is as concrete as anything there is, and has been described at great length with much gusto and explicit detail. Freedom would be a pure abstraction if it were not for its measurable limits which are not nearly as remote as they may appear, since they are the normal effort of population toward complete emancipation, within a definite political area, and the duration of that normal effort, which is measured by time.

If we can brush away old misconceptions, and realize that in using the term value, as we do, we are now committed to a concrete absurdity; and if we realize further that the formal tokens of value, which we call money, have always, even in the days of Cæsar, been generally honored tokens of our freedom to move and choose, however vitiated at times by the various arbitrary mandates which we have struggled to eliminate, then we should be able to comprehend that in an area of self-imposed order freedom and economic value are one and the same thing.

Guided by this conception of the necessity of determining total economic value, or human freedom, in terms of its ulti-