Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/91

 exerts effort, limited by time. He now turns again to his desired undertaking and, once more, figures rent and wages together with the interest on his painfully acquired capital, so that the estimate of his costs works out as follows: Rent per year for land, wages per year for labor and interest per year for his accumulated capital. But this capital, as we have seen, was the product of his own labor per year upon land, so that we have only three elementary factors involved which are themselves measurable, namely effort, the source of all value, which may be measured as a whole by population, Land, the area within which that effort is confined; and Time, the measure of its duration.

In reality, capital is a product designed purely for consumption, and has its dynamic function as an inducement of effort, or else it is a depreciating facility, justly credited (while it lasts), to its creator, capable of accelerating the flow of effort which may be thwarted by its lack. Let us take the electric broiling of a squab to illustrate an inducement of effort; and the electric welding of a street-car track to illustrate a facilitation of effort.

Having shown briefly that capital is not an element, but a secondary product of effort limited by land-area and time, within the theater of Nature, let us consider separately these three factors and strip them, if possible, to their vital and elementary significance.

Land.&emsp;The importance of this factor rests upon the circumstance that it cannot be increased by any art or policy within the given political boundaries with which democracy has to deal. For the measurement of effort it provides a simple factor in square inches, namely area, which, in combination with population is what we need to ascertain the “occupancy-value,” “pressure,” “head,” or “potential,” whichever we care to call it. However, in speaking of land the same kind of unscientific confusion has crept into economics that we have found in discussing capital. The only constant and measurable quality of land is its superficial area, and the importance of this varies with population, exactly as the importance of the area of any