Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/99

 exactly as weight is measured by pounds, or area by inches. If we are to do any sound economic measuring whatever, we must take cognisance of time, otherwise our so-called economics will continue to be a pathetic mixture of complacency, protest and dreams—a medley of as imaginative factors as ever the alchemists used when fire and life were regarded as chemical elements. Our present so-called “basic” element of capital is just as unscientific, and the factors called “Nature,” “natural bounty” or “social-product” just as mystic; and it is no wonder that our equations do not balance.

To introduce into the elementary economic problem of measuring the value of effort in a region of order, unmeasurable factors of past time and dead labor, and to depend for effective flow upon the wing-dams of social and legislative debris, is almost beyond characterization. Our present text book factors are a charge for land-area, enriched by the fruits of past labor, which we call rent; a charge for labor, which we call wages; and a charge for the product of land, past time and past labor, which we call interest—all expressed in terms of a vague fluctuating unit—and with these we have a liberal sprinkling of herbs and simples. The political-economists, the moralists and the politicians, between them, have arrived at formulæ in which the flavors of cupidity, resignation, perplexity, luck and legerdemain are so mixed that the engineer is fully justified in adding them to his museum where aqua vitæ, the philosophers’ stone and the other objects of the black arts lie covered with dust.

And yet time, of all our factors, seems to have so much of the quality of magic that it is no wonder the economists were inclined to regard it with suspicion. The moralists looked on it as a gift of God which it would be impious to examine; the emancipated materialists could not see either the beginning or the end of it, and were not going to be diverted by any thing so intangible. Even now it seems to be the only gift left out of all we hoped for from the fairies; and yet, for each individual unit of the human race it is not so intangible a factor after all; we walk across our allotted span and come to the far edge as we might traverse an estate—the exact period of time