Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/354

 whose methods of attaining it are foredamned. And yet there is this to be said for the sentimentalist—his vision is instinctive and true, and while his methods are often coercive, it is because they are induced. He also lives under the shadows of tradition and lights his little tapers.

An attempt has already been made to show that the question of protection is a political one: it has no place in economic science. But there is, unfortunately, no possible application of pure economic science if we are dealing with the interchanges of arbitrarily sealed political areas, since under these conditions there is no such thing as free flow. Except as between similarly organized self-attained democracies, which stand ready to trust each other, the whole international problem has to be dealt with by the rules of the ancient art of political economy. For this reason if we throw the whole burden of taxation upon the owner of land we are logically bound to protect his products, whether they are turnips or motor-cars (for there is to be a responsible landlord as tax-trustee for each of these industries) against the competition of turnips or motor-cars which are the product of foreign areas where economic coercion can still be practiced. Since we now have in force a tariff which pretends to protect the farmer, and have had, for a long time, a tariff which protects the manufacturer, there is no novel difficulty to be faced—save only the painful task of dealing firmly with the sentimentalist who, after all, is probably right if he will give us time to settle down. If order can accomplish in the dynamics of human effort anything like the change it is capable of accomplishing in hydraulics, there will be little chance of any low-pressure services entering our high-pressure system, any more than the overflow of a spring at low levels can be introduced into a high-pressure pipe which draws its water from the mountains. Under such order and industrial co-ordination as we have, we are today producing many articles more cheaply than any country in the world, at a higher rate of