Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/299

 Census-area, on the other hand, can neither be hoarded or exported so as to impair our measurement of available supply; nor can it be unexpectedly produced at a cost which is less than its value to the community.

Owing to the use of a fluctuating unit of value, nominally based upon gold, we have been in trouble: the dates of our economic crises have their place in history. What we now have to face is an unprecedented volume of impossible promises to pay in gold; and while we have avoided the disaster of panic, we have not avoided its long-drawn-out and smothered effects. If we continue to be loyal to the gold-standard tradition, and acquiesce in any policy of deflation designed to make these obligations worth what we used to call dollars, we are entering upon a period of economic servitude that will last beyond our lifetime; and it is this prospect that our deflationists are holding out to us.

What are we going to do consciously to meet this difficulty? If we meet it unconsciously we may for a while acquiesce meekly in a process which silently doubles our actual obligations, in terms of goods and services: we may revolt suddenly and smash everything in sight; or we may look forward to aimless inflation through such mediums as price-fixing, ship subsidies, import taxes, pensions, exemptions, sales-taxes, etc., which will mean a steady increase in prices and unavoidable increases in wages to hold off revolutionary protest. In effect this will mean that our government will be forced into a more or less blind and creeping policy of repudiation of the so-called gold-dollar, which will result not only in the dilution of present fortunes but in the appropriation of present savings. As stated before, neither resignation nor revolution is likely to ensue: inflation is all we can expect, but there is something to be gained by the supervision of this in an attempt to protect the weaker victims.

Is there any sane program which can be put forward to anticipate in some measure our ensuing era of inflation, and connect, once for all, our nominal and fictitious value with actual scientific and unimpairable value, or in terms of the diagnosis put forward, connect so-called gold-dollar value at