Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/338

 (a)&emsp;A modicum of gold normally belonging to some one else.

(b)&emsp;Government bonds for which sufficient gold does not exist anywhere to pay, or

(c)&emsp;Two-signature commercial paper, promising to pay gold, only a fraction of which exists and is almost always owned elsewhere, and by

(d)&emsp;Its own assets, all expressed in gold, only a fraction of which exists and is also owned elsewhere.

Against these the Federal Reserve Board issues currency “payable in gold,” with the knowledge of every one concerned that it is only payable in gold if full payment in gold is not demanded.

Under the proposed system instead of using optimistic titles to gold (which are no more real than elaborate deeds to imaginary land), a Member Bank would put forward, as security for currency, a duly recorded tax-paid title to land valued in terms of population, the measurable essential of value. Here is our one real value: and it is ample. We are only afraid of it because we have been brought up to believe in ghosts.

If titles to land as calculably redundant as our titles to gold were sent through the mails the sender would be imprisoned; and yet we go on looking at our currency, repeating like parrots, “It must be gold: it must be gold.”

Because of this delusion of value tied to one privately controlled commodity, we live out our lives in tragic disorder. We see a little group—a desperate man, with eyes averted, and an uncomprehending woman, striving to pacify hungry children who ask for food. It is hard to use precise scientific language in describing the tragedies due to this delusion. Let us put it impersonally to recover a calm detachment: the medium of exchange having proved inadequate with relation to increasing activity, demand was suddenly blocked while supply continued. Ill-informed production was followed by deflation, and there ensued some confusion industrially. That children are under-nourished, that women curse the day they