Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/97

 Gide puts it, “consequently every system which will tend to reduce individual energy will not stand a great chance of gaining anything especially advantageous from collective enterprises, however ingeniously they may be organized.”

Only with the two poles of necessity and inducement left unimpaired can labor or human effort be depended upon, and subsequently measured as a whole, in terms of population.

The contention that population is one of the prime factors of economic value may appear to be heresy for it disregards Malthus who with a bland assertion that increase in sustenance tends to be arithmetical as compared with a geometrical increase in population, laid down a so-called “law” which has acted as a red flag long after the supposed danger has been proved to be imaginary. This red flag still flies, but it is getting bleached and frayed. Malthus knew little about the enduring mental labor of the scientist who, while he does not create, is able through accurate measurement to eliminate friction. Invention was in its infancy; and Malthus never dreamed of such a thing as the fixation of nitrogen, which is an effective step toward the synthesis of food. The carbon, phosphorus and potash in the grain of wheat have always returned quickly to the earth from which they came, but nitrogen, that outlaw element, was still playing truant in the days of Malthus. Since then we have learned that with the directing intellectual labor of a few men, all we require to resocialize nitrogen is the skilled utilization of Time—six months’ evaporation of sea water and six months’ precipitation of snow upon the mountains. By this use of natural tides we can come near doubling the yield of an acre planted to wheat, and bring into bearing many millions of acres which have never grown wheat. Such contributions as these are not merely limited and immediate gifts: they are steps in our physical and intellectual emancipation, with consequences which multiply even faster than population.