Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/38

 necessary is it to be on guard against coercion by individuals or groups? Politically this coercion is supposed to be impossible: economically it is accomplished. In spite of the apparent need for caution, we have permitted the creation of trust–funds with organic vitality so great that it saps that of the community; and have continued to acquiesce in a system of inheritance which suffers the succession of incompetents to great power without corresponding responsibility, chiefly because we have made no intelligent attempt to measure either the one or the other. Our tolerance of arrogant combinations of both capital and labor, and our tendency to permit combinations of a few favored farmers,—all of these are obvious departures from the original dream of equality of opportunity. We treat the symptoms of malpractice with counter-irritants. The growing danger of this course of action is that we are again permitting economic power to reconcentrate to the advantage of small groups and, in many cases, to the detriment of our freedom. When we become painfully aware of these concentrations, in our lassitude or bad temper, we ill-advisedly hand them over en bloc to various unco-ordinated state bureaus which have both the inclination and opportunity to become self-perpetuating, thus limiting individual freedom of action even more rigidly than if the powers had been left in private hands. Many complicated remedies are being tried. The graduated inheritance-tax, with all its clumsy machinery of appraisement, is our ill-considered response to the disguised doctrine of divine-right, but, as it is almost impossible to distinguish between genuine and evasive gifts made prior to death, this whole question is one to be carefully weighed. If we make responsibility proportional to power, we can probably save ourselves the trouble of interfering either with gift or bequest if these are any inducement to individual effort, since this individual effort is what democracy was designed to encourage.

The high rank of “monopoly” is too lightly conceded in some cases and too vindictively bestowed in others. Brilliant developments of services or ideas may appear to be monopolies owing to the magnitude of their reward, but these services and ideas can be duplicated or bettered by effort and, since the in-