Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/255

 the ratio of 1 to 15.25. This is the explanation of what we call civilization, and arises from the relationship of value to effort and resistance.

Now this community, being entirely free of the habit of raising an exportable surplus as imperial tribute, and equally free of the gold-standard tradition, would be able to give rational consideration to. the construction of a scientific unit of value. The descendants of the statisticians would probably have satisfied their longing for price curves and business cycles by means of cowrie shells: but the Coast and Geodetic Survey descendants, congenitally hungry for equations that close, and aware of the relation between effort and resistance, would be driven back to their least common denominators, area, density and time,—in terms of which the cost of overcoming resistance, and the measure of value, can both be impersonally expressed.

The difference between the engineer and the economist is this: the engineer knows that he can express total potential effort and the total sum of resistance in common measurable terms, even if he is not sure of total value; while the economist, with his water-tight conceptions of several different kinds of value, makes the fatal error of ignoring altogether the cost of overcoming resistance. Here lies all the difference between relative precision and hopeless confusion.

We have accepted gold in the past as a measure of value only because there was no conception of a definite zone of freedom; and the best that could be said of economic value was that it was the uncertain mitigation of our servitude to an arbitrary of some kind or other.

We face, therefore, under democracy, if it is concerned with unimpairable freedom, the imperative necessity of expressing total basic national value in terms of its ultimate limits; and, having accomplished this, of expressing all fractional values by a comprehensive unit which is integrally related to the whole, instead of being a definite number of ounces of some unmeasurable and uncontrollable part of the whole.

For these reasons no remedy, however generous in conception, can rid us of our confusion, until valid measurement, the