Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/341

 There could be no plethora, and no scarcity, of money, any more than, under a scientific method of measuring dynamic value, there could be a plethora or scarcity of foot-pound-seconds in a mile-ton-year. There might be a scarcity of pounds if we insisted on trying to measure the value of our mile-ton-year in terms of pounds alone: and there could not fail to be a plethora of pounds if we issued 25 to 30 thousand million 1 !b. certificates—even though they were called “gold” pounds. Barring some extraordinary fluke we shall always have plethora or stringency plaguing us as long as we attempt to measure compound value by one unrelated and erratic dimension.

The volume of currency and the rate of interest would then settle themselves in terms of known supply and informed demand, and we would be free to go about our proper business of producing real value, instead of endeavoring to make a living at the expense of an equally bedevilled neighbor by gambling, as we do daily, on the vagaries of spurious values expressed in terms of so-called “gold” dollars.

The scrutiny of impairable capital, appraised in terms of a scientific currency, may well be left to local banks, along with the essential service of extending credit based upon personal integrity and other intangible values best appreciated locally; and the issuance of currency left to the Federal Reserve System as an arm of an otherwise occupied Treasury Department whose net “Treasure” today is a vast debt, so hopelessly unmeasurable in terms of gold that with every onslaught of the inflationists, and every vicious counter-attack of the deflationists, its menacing bulk shrinks or swells disastrously and casts terrifying shadows across the economic field.

Having reached our majority and, by means of the institution of democracy, inherited our estate, it seems illogical that we should still be kept on an arbitrary allowance of value. Is there not some slight suggestion of imbecility or, at any rate, incompetency, in the fact that we have to go to guardians to determine the extent of our economic freedom?

The volume of currency is not a problem, if we can only solve the major problem of measuring value.