Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/96

 in direct proportion to population, exactly as an engineer will state that his potential hydraulic value, later to be converted into “work,” is in direct proportion to the available height of water within a given area, no matter how this water may have meandered ornamentally or uselessly in marshy meadows before it was confined; but while potential human effort is proportional to population, its full physical effectiveness cannot be developed except by the autocratic state. This is the fact that lies behind the primitive worship of “efficiency.” It was such so-called “efficient” utilization of human effort that built the costly Pyramids. An operation of this nature is paralleled in applied physics by the placer-miner’s use of hydraulic energy. He confines a river in a limited area and leads it, as though in chains, for great distances, so that when liberated under control it does the work of a giant. Obviously, all that is gained at the culmination of this operation is lost to the intermediate spaces. The development of available human effort dreamed of by democracy is much more nearly parallel to the conversion of potential hydraulic value into electric power, to be sent back for equitable advantageous use on all the intervening terraces.

Labor, or human effort, under what we call democracy, can only be compelled through need or induced by reward.

Need and reward, or necessity and inducement—these, then, are the two poles of human effort, respectively negative and positive; and as far as calculation is concerned, have the gratifying effect of polarity, swinging adverse inclinations into uniformity so that they may be measured. This determination of direction gives rise to what the engineer calls the “sense” of a force.

Any socialistic attempt to destroy these poles—to remove necessity, impair reward and quite literally ignore sense—promises speedy confusion; and our present efforts at political adjustment are so nearly socialistic that the consequences are very costly. Owing to our misconception as to the nature of value, we thwart it at the outset and then try to offset this by various devices which only result in further friction. As