Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/83

 upon the mountains, and perpetually forcing its way to the sea—a never-ending cycle where effort and freedom are in direct relation, and have only to be consolidated by order to provide us with a measurable flow of value.



But even Bastiat’s image of the satisfied animal is better than the implied picture, upon which many generations of students have been brought up, representing the whole economic tableau as a kind of egg-laying performance, where there may be a rough approximation of the number of eggs, but the size of the egg is governed by the mood of a spotless white hen. Labor, in this tableau, is the lean choreman who tends the hen, and for his share receives a disappointing portion of these variable-sized eggs, which are set apart in a “wage-fund.” Capital is the hen herself—a magnificent white super-hen, waxing ever fatter on a diet of the crumbled yellow yolks of her own hard-boiled eggs, together with the product of the land on which she rests; and this land, to make up for its failing virtue, is constantly fertilized by the egg shells, the feathers and the nitrogenous by-products of the hen.

The pictures of the pressure-chamber and the stream, though they avoid much complicated detail, are probably closer and