Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/278

 Now at the risk of wearying the reader the diagnosis is this: during the transition from autocracy to democracy, basic economic power, arising from the control of value, and basic economic responsibility, which should be proportionate to this control, became entirely divorced. This took place without scrutiny because we were at no pains to find where power lay, or to measure it scientifically. As a consequence of the absence of order, value became an empty word.

In other words, the diagnosis alleges that economic responsibility for the insurance of order, and the value resulting, have not been capable of impersonal measurement since they were wrested from the autocrat; and that this must be made possible if effort is to be freed from the deadening entanglement of privilege—that is, if democracy is to be able in any way to provide guaranties of individual freedom. If this is admitted, then any remedy put forward must offer, first, a valid means of impersonally correlating economic power and economic responsibility; and, second, it must put forward a rational means of measuring the resulting value.

Before attempting even the outlines of a tentative remedy it seems important to try to clear away unconscious prejudice by emphasizing the fact that the diagnosis of our ailment put forward is not purely deductive, but is a deliberate sweeping aside of autocratic tradition, and the long-standing illusions which have arisen in economics because of this tradition. The measuring of economic values within national boundaries by the use of gold was a perfectly logical attempt to remove the hazard of fraud as between a monarch and his subjects, or between these subjects themselves, since there was no conception of the relation of order to value, and since every tangible value was either a private preserve, or was subject to arbitrary alteration through edict, exactly as they are today internationally, under circumstances that still make the use of gold unavoidable.

It is most important to realize that we are not the victims of some vicious “system.” There is no system.