Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/71

 shoes or his hat, and that he may appear very awkward to a certain type of high-priest to whom genuflection at certain points has become second nature; but with this awkwardness there are certain advantages. The greatest advantage is this—he can commence his investigations free from the domination of an unbroken tradition in economics which has been maintained since the days of autocracy. There is no question that certain fundamental economic truths were very near being high-treason and as a consequence were emphasized exceedingly gently when originally discerned. To enquire with any insistence what taxation should be was to threaten the king’s revenue: to investigate the flaws in currency was to question the king’s honor: these were parlous diversions in those days, and there is justification for saying that, even today, a straight-forward query as to such vital facts as an engineer would know for his guidance will set an old-fashioned economic ritualist shaking his head over the dangers of heresy. It is only necessary, for example, to ask what scientific sanction there is for measuring human effort, and freedom, its logical resultant, by means of ounces of gold of a fluctuating replacement-cost in terms of that same initial effort.

Let us get outside the noble economic edifice for a moment, with its wonderfully blended medley of architecture, its dim lights, its interesting historical associations, its rose windows and its lack of plumbing; and sit in the sunshine on some convenient tombstone in the churchyard to talk the matter out.

The most deplorable lack is a point of departure which will “stay out”: we have no datum in the form of a measure of such values as we must discuss.

Our physical unit of weight is the relation between the fractional mass of the material of which it is formed and the total mass of the earth; and our just economic measure must also have this relative integrity, maintaining a constant value in the total pressure of the economic field. Freedom—the power to move—this is the only thing that truly constitutes economic value; for economic value in the last analysis is clearly our ability to maintain our freedom of motion in a field of in-