Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/352

 sequently doubling our total dynamic value, by means of this adjustment alone. In addition to this, the acceleration in the rate of flow (quite apart from the volume of flow), due to the diminishment of resistance, is capable of again enormously increasing total value.

The landlord, who in many cases instinctively holds real property as insurance against the steadily depreciating dollar, will also be forced into the labor market to his surprise—and very much to his moral advantage. He will have ample warning, but he is astute enough to heed it.

It sounds, perhaps, too much like the millennium for inclusion in a critical review of economic maladjustment; but that is simply because our minds are dulled and wearied by the meaningless clap-trap of politico-economic ritual. We know that by a little planning—the boring of a tunnel and the grading of a ditch—we can liberate and utilize hydraulic energy equal to that of half a million men; we know that by the wise direction of these waters in their free and spontaneous flow toward the sea we can multiply the fertility of hundreds of thousands acres of land, and we know that, in the end, these waters will find the sea and again be recreated upon the mountains as snow. All we have done in this inevitable cycle is to provide order and utilize freedom. Is there no voice convincing enough to teach us that through order we can also utilize pent-up human effort, liberate value and amplify freedom, to the advantage of our generation?

Within our own lifetime men have diverted a rushing mountain stream and made a pittance by cleaning up the paltry winnings of its undirected energy which in periods of flood tore down the margin of some projecting quartz ledge. Today these same old men, harbored in county hospitals in the foothills, can walk to the gates of their pitiful sanctuary and hear the sustained music of great dynamos impelling that disregarded power to farms and factories. But this is no millennial vision: it is the result of science—the provision of basic order and the study of just measurement. The same laws are valid in the dynamics of human effort—in the “science of economics,” if we can stand the phrase without nausea. Order, or