Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/353

 marginal control, and the free flow of effort—these are all that is necessary, and these—if the parallel has to be driven home to our comprehension—are simply just taxation of land-area, the basis of control, to provide order, and thus define value, and the liberation—or exemption—of human effort.

It must be borne in mind that inflation is our goal. Wilful, precise and final inflation of our conception of value—sanguine, logical and unending inflation of the corresponding effort.

Universal exemption from taxation, except upon control of value, would undoubtedly result in a freedom from care and confusion that might be followed by some free spending and by some that was unwise; but the unwise spending would be checked by several cogent considerations. Savings would become unimpairable. For those who desired through land-ownership to maintain their newly validated individual sovereignty there would be the realization that it involved a gradually-approaching and never-ending annual responsibility, and the knowledge that the maintenance of this sovereignty ensured with every increase in population an actual enhancement of scientific land value. It would be in effect a legitimate harvest—a harvest of enriched sovereignty and proportionate responsibility, instead of being, as it is today, a windfall of power (stripped of its complementary duties) which is now gathered up by those who are strong enough to survive our devastating periods of inflation and deflation.

There might be some of the symptoms of inflation, arising from pure relief—a little exuberance may be looked for with liberation; but the evils due to such inflation would be mild compared with those that now overshadow us because of political pressure.

There is, unfortunately, one more point to be discussed, and it is not the conservative who has to be convinced, but the sentimentalist whose vision of the millennium is undimmed and