Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/42

 with unaccomplished and vitally necessary tasks in the way of drainage, roadbuilding and reforestation, if he had surplus labor available, particularly if his tenants were clamoring for these improvements? Obviously he would employ this surplus labor gladly and set it at these non-competitive undertakings. Just as obviously, if he were a wise landlord, he would settle diplomatically all the bickerings of his tenants as to a fair wage, and would be delighted at the opportunity of setting a scientific standard of remuneration against which his most niggardly tenant would have to bid.

Our failure here is a secondary one. The primary failure is our blindness as to the just relationship between power, the control of value, and taxation, the insurance of value. We know there are specific tasks to be accomplished: we know there are periodic seasons of desperate unemployment; but we cannot take advantage of the situation because we have elected, or are sufficiently stupid, to tax activity and need instead of power. Power is silent and still evades us; but we can always lay our hands on need, and intercept activity. We have driven arbitrary taxation—this ancient weapon of autocracy—as a wedge between the task and the tool—between public needs and surplus labor. Owing to our primitive interest in nostrums, we have not stopped to realize that the task and the tool can be much more simply dealt with as two complementary phases of the same problem.

The facilitation of production and exchange is so plainly advantageous to both state and citizen that there is no need to amplify here. Our failure to provide physical facilities is not due to a lack of perception on the part of anyone as to what should be done, but to the difficulty of ascertaining what we can afford to spend, owing to our absurd taxation, which is based on consumption and activity—on need and effort—instead of underlying power.

General improvements such as the construction and maintenance of highways and other facilities, and the reclaiming of the unoccupied public domain, so that it may be turned over to private and productive ownership as quickly as possible—these are urgent tasks, to be paid for by taxation which is propor-