Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/92

 other physical container of energy varies with pressure. Gide perceives this when he defines the factor which he calls “ground” as “a superficial extension…a certain space, were it only to stand on,” adding, “now this question of ‘room’ becomes very serious as soon as the population of a country has grown sufficiently dense.”

Many political-economists of the alchemist type are inclined to complicate this definite mathematical quality of land with other values, liberated by past labor, which are either general facilities resulting in the elimination of friction, or else are justly-owned capital, or stored effort. In either case, owing to inevitable duplication or decay, they are impossible to measure scientifically except by the free flow of population; and they lead us into endless difficulties if we attempt to measure them in any other way.

The trouble with the romantic economists is that they cannot mentally separate their quart measure and other people’s strawberries. The added capital-values of realized effort have been bought, sold and exchanged in good faith: they have nothing to do with the initial flow of human effort, though they have a great deal to do with its subsequent effectiveness and its path.

Nearly all the advocates of single-tax contributed to this error: Patrick Edward Dove includes with land, the mines, the forests and the fisheries; Sir John Macdonell includes mines; Edward McGlynn speaks of the “natural bounties which God gave to the community in the beginning”; Thomas G. Shearman includes “natural advantages”; and Fillebrown emphasizes “natural resources such as gold, silver, copper, iron and coal mines, oil fields and water powers”—and then performs a complete somersault and instead of classifying them as divine favors, includes them with those “social products which make ground rent a special privilege.” It is a most misleading error and is what has stood so long in the way of just taxation. If copper, silver and gold made up the gravel of our streams; if oil flowed gently from convenient springs; and if our forests marched in orderly ranks along our main