Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/292

 perialism in the center of our national domain. The royalties exacted from effort by taxation and the royalty of privately owned gold are exactly as arbitrary when they rest on legislative whim as when they rested upon ‘“Divine-right.”

What is here proposed is to make taxation impersonal; and to put gold back upon the basis of all other commodities, and let it be valued by demand, the validity of which can be measured by means of an unimpairable unit based upon the same fundamental and ultimate factors that limit total basic economic value. Some conception of this clearly underlies the logic of the more imaginative economists whose apologies for employing empirical methods might be comprehended in the composite phrase, “But, of course, we realize that fundamentally value arises from the labor of man applied to land over a given period.” In many cases they appear to have been bewildered by their self-imposed obligation to maintain an unbroken sequence of logic through autocracy and into democracy. They do not seem to realize that in economics there cannot be any logical continuity of argument from autocracy into democracy, any more than the behavior of a complete solution can be predicated upon the behavior of a solvent which contains crystals still undissolved. To carry on into democracy an arbitrary system of measuring value, which was initiated during autocracy for the maintenance of conceded privilege, is the cause of most of our confusion, and is as illogical as though a miner were to discover a vein in Archean granite and attempt to follow this through some terrific dislocation into the adjacent but unrelated sedimentaries of thousands of years later. If he finds a vein which looks similar, or if he persuades himself that it must be similar, he is very much to be pitied, since all his logic, based upon precedent, is totally misleading. He may be a skilful and conscientious miner, but if, at this juncture, he does not turn to the geologist and rearrange his conception he faces endless confusion.

And yet, even if it is conceded that these three cleanly measurable economic dimensions, Land-area, Population and Time, do, in fact, completely comprehend all human energy, as expressed in the medium of space and matter, their practical