Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/252

 is the simplest possible way of disclosing the fact that such a lack of balance exists.

It has been shown very fully that a scientific unit of dynamic value must represent total value, and that total value is the ratio between total effort and total resistance.

It is at this point that the scientist and the ritualist part company. <A so-called unit of value which takes no cognisance of the negative components of economic value, is scientifically as ludicrous as a foot-pound-second would be if it had been deliberately arranged that Saturn need only come to heel in the solar system at the periodic whistle of some erratic tax-collector.

A demonstration that the structure of our present unit of value is unscientific should be spur enough to the economist. But we are so used to the fact that it is unscientific and so hardened to the sight of economic distress that “unscientific” by now has no sting. Our unit of value is not only unscientific: being clearly subject to retroactive debasement, it is spurious and normally irredeemable, if we think in terms of value instead of gold.

Under the one rationalizing condition of self-imposed order, or national equilibrium, the basic economic calculations are almost unbelievably simple. Supply and demand turn out to be identical, being nothing more than the two facial aspects of the same cross-section of flow. On any given section the quality of economic value in relation to the quality of total value may be expressed quantitatively in terms of total area and population-density.

Within such a total area, in the medium of matter, or physical equilibrium, we have a so-called demand-factor, made up of a long series of differentials of individual desire for sustenance, comfort, security, culture, beauty and joy—in short, for individual freedom—and this series gives rise to a so-called supply-factor, determined by a complementary series of differentials expressing individual effort. In the same area, and in the same medium, we have also another form of demand—an equally long series of differentials expressing the desire and conception of order, and, induced by this, a complementary