Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/86

 pings might, if we had suitable instruments, be measured by the “moment” of the two forces of need and desire, with the resultant “torsion” on the hungry man who stands halfway between the bread and the prospect. ''And the interesting thing to realize is that we have not only a suitable instrument; but a most accurate instrument, namely, a dial which is national area, graduated in terms of population-density, with the very sensitive indicator of individual ownership. To the question “What is a thing worth?” the answer is the tax-paid, fractional area enriched by population which is placed in jeopardy to secure it, with the full knowledge that no political power can alter the dial.''

Surely, the obligation laid upon the economist is the study of the control, measurement, development and distribution of human energy, whether the product of that energy is capital, utility, wealth, or human happiness; and this is still more urgent and obvious if the net resultant should be a minus one, or human wastage and misery. Energy can never be measured in terms of its product; and it cannot even be approximated if our archaic conventions tend to baffle and impede it. The value of human energy and its various resultants cannot possibly be measured except in a region of self-determined order, and then only in terms of its ultimate fixed limits—Population (defining density), Land (defining volume), and Time (defining duration of effort).

Now if these three fundamental and measurable factors were actually employed to measure potential value:to assess individual responsibility in terms of taxation (the cost of order) and to calculate the total resulting value, and the fractional values which are expressed by our currency; there might be some ground for claiming a scientific basis for applied economics; but to delegate today, exactly as we did in the days of autocracy, the incidence of taxation to fallible, arbitrary and incompetent human judgment; the final control of the resulting value to private or alien owners of massed gold; and the calculation of our necessary currency to political agents, who cannot keep their hands on these owners, is as little scientific as can be.