Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/44

 come to a point where we calmly, and without any sense of shame, commission a Federal Bureau to measure its fluctuations in terms of goods! If our currency were bullion, it would then be a scarce and durable commodity of small bulk and, without doubt, very convenient from this aspect, but to say today that our currency represents bullion is to expose oneself to the suspicion of being either dishonest or ignorant.

There are many partial remedies proposed to make our tokens of value representative of value. To talk of barter is to go back to the disorderly methods with which we started—goods for goods, and the devil take the hindmost who is left with a surplus. There is no facilitation of exchange in this proposal, for if put in practice goods would wear themselves out as they moved backward and forward in the liquidation of bargains, and in the absence of desirable goods there would be no payment available for surplus effort. We should live from hand to mouth; and our civilization would revert to the limitations of tribal intercourse.

To propose as a measure of value or a medium of exchange a bulky and vital commodity such as wheat, is to subject our currency to the threat of inflation from every homestead in the United States, to make the normal cost of remitting balances more nearly ten per cent than one per cent, to live in fear of interruption to traffic, to expose our security to locust and weevil, and to become again worshippers of the sun and seasons.

To put our trust in labor as a measurable basis of value is fully as foolish as putting it in princes: and for labor as a body, it means ultimately working under the spur of the bayonet or the humiliation of a speedometer. There never was a basis of value suggested more capable of sullen or whimsical dilution than this.

To adopt the fluctuating weight of gold advocated by many, with Professor Irving Fisher as their leader, is to put new wine in old bottles. It is an attempt to compromise, but still deals with currency in terms of fluctuating goods and gold, not in terms of measurable value.

The solution of this problem is not obvious but surely there can be found, within a well-ordered state, some measurable basic