Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/268

 carrying a penalty, or has been translated into a mortgage. Somehow, somewhere, he has to procure money to meet this, or lose his land.

The unfortunate man faces his plight doggedly, and hopes with a sense of shame—which should be quite vicarious—that by dispensing with the choreman, rising an hour earlier, and utilizing the services of his wife and children, he can win through—but, in face of all the logic of adverse data, he again plants oats or barley or wheat or corn, thus adding to our exportable surplus, and dragging down the price of his neighbor’s output. It should be evident that under our present system of taxation we have the farmer very neatly trapped, so that, even in the face of disaster, he must keep adding to our surplus of cheap food. It is probable that nothing more ingenious was ever devised by a native princeling of India: indeed, it is a question whether such a one would not be a little chagrined at having overlooked our plan of adding a mounting penalty to taxation in case of low markets or a crop failure, thus ensuring either a cheap exportable surplus for the coming year, or the dispossession of the small landed proprietor who might, under prosperity, grow too independent as to what he saw fit to produce, and base his activities on the demand of others instead of his own desperation!

At various points in our examination of the possibility of an economic system, rationalized to conform to the impersonal ultimata of science and the hopeful assumptions of democracy, it appeared obvious that the continuous victim of our present maladjustment is the farmer. There are other outstanding victims, particularly the unorganized laborer, the unemployed, the small investor and the less powerful manufacturer; but these are chiefly the victims of the inevitable “cycles of depression” which result from our unscientific currency; while the farmer is the residual legatee of all our maladjustment.

A cross-section at any point in the economic circuit shows the unnecessary obstructions in our channels of exchange, or flow, due to illogical taxation and currency; but a basic cross-section in the zone of agricultural production lays the whole matter bare.

In 1920, the farmers of the United States, with the help of their wives and children, earned, according to the estimate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an actual wage of about $219 per family. This is based upon an esti-