Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/277

 lack of sinister significance to us is due to the fact that we have not learned to apprehend coercion if purely economic. If a policeman were to enter our house and seize our goods without a warrant we would be ready to fight, but our savings bank can be invisibly tapped of half the value of our deposit, leaving our deposit intact, and we are only bewildered. If a messenger of the government supported by an armed body-guard were to seize a portion of the American farmer’s crop (as we do now under our personal property tax), while a wealthy neighbor was exempt (as he now is under the Farm Loan Act), the American farmer would be reaching for his gun; but because this discrimination is not apparent, the farmer struggles to raise the extra money needed, denying himself, and his family, leisure and the simple decencies of life, while he foolishly imagines that every other citizen is in the same difficulty. And the irony of the situation is that it is quite useless meeting this injustice with the old-fashioned and rather dignified gesture of reaching for the gun—there is no one to shoot but ourselves. Through political liberty and economic ignorance we are not only individually the victims of tyranny but jointly we are the tyrant.

At this juncture in our history, however, there is a great probability that we shall commence to correlate cause and effect; for while the symptoms are basically no different, they are enormously accentuated: where we were formerly a little lame we are now crippled: where we formerly stumbled we now fall; so that it is possible that we may at last become interested in an investigation of the cause of our confusion.

For the reasons just stated, which it would be difficult to dispute, some rearrangement seems called for. The outlines of a logical adjustment are put forward, therefore; but they are put forward tentatively, with a full realization that they call for the most searching criticism, yet, nevertheless, with a deep conviction that the diagnosis, and not the specific remedy, is the important thing to be accepted or rejected. The diagnosis has been stated with the utmost confidence: the remedy is quite properly a matter for discussion between such as there may be to accept the diagnosis.