Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/276

 The incontestable fact is that the major portion of the stream of desire is choked by obstructions and rendered ineffective. The paltry effective demand that emerges is fought for as wastefully as hogs fight for food. We blindly devote the bulk of our liberated effort to the production of commodities and then scatter them boastfully over the world, instead of utilizing all surplus effort for the creation of common facilities, and, by this simple adjustment, not only increase effective demand, but vastly increase total value by the diminishment of resistance. Money is only the token of a nation’s medium of exchange: bridges, highways, schools and hospitals are contributions to the value it should represent.

We have taken over into what we call democracy a political machine which was skilfully fashioned for the purpose of encouraging supply and thwarting all demand, except that of a favored few. It worked badly; but it was capable of forcing a production of exportable commodities which were promptly commandeered, through the instrumentality of coercive rent, false interest and oppressive taxes, and sent abroad in exchange for laces, silks, wines and spices for the further gratification of the favored few. We took this machinery over blind to its purposes and we have since got rid of its beneficiaries; but we have not made much improvement in the lot of the victims. As a matter of fact we have modified everything but its restrictive functions. It is true that we have wrested its control from those who used it so profitably for themselves; but they had one qualification in their favor which we lack. They knew how it was built and what it was built for. What we have done is to eliminate the tyrant but not the tyranny—and we are all victims. The controller of supply now fights for a share of thwarted demand instead of calmly taking it on his own terms as formerly.

The most surprising thing about many of these symptoms—debasement of currency, tyrannous taxation, well-placed exemption, etc.—is that they are in no way novel symptoms of disorder, or even newly discovered. They are typical symptoms, long charted by historians, of arbitrary power (that is, power divorced from its corresponding responsibility), which not only antedate the Magna Charta and the decay of Greece and Rome but were a subject of deep concern to the framers of the Mosaic Code, who swept away their economic confusion at regular intervals by means of a jubilee. Their