Preface
tioned by us, it rests, beyond shadow of doubt, upon our own shoulders. To attempt to measure value without any consideration of the cost of overcoming resistance is a pathetic survival of bondage. And to sanction, as we do today, impenetrable international barriers to goods and services, while we grant to gold all the privileges of an ambassador—and boast of it—is to invite the world’s most able men to deal in this dominating commodity. If these are wrongly reproached on any score, surely the most wrongful of reproaches would be to assert that they fail to utilize the most effective medium for their imperial operations.
There are only two explicit adjustments suggested. One is to make taxation scientific and impersonal—and then forget it. The other is to construct a basic and unimpairable measure of value and then employ it, not as a thing of value, but as an entirely unprejudiced means of recording justly the sensitive, critical and vital human appraisements of goods, services, facilities, culture and order which give them value.
In the last analysis there is only one adjustment suggested: this is to put the purely mechanical problems of taxation and currency deliberately under our feet, or, in other words, to disentangle from the necessary mechanism of our economic system, its dynamic value—which is individual freedom.
To venture into a field where the claims of the academicians now actually overlap would be rash, if it were not for very generous encouragement such as that held out by one of the most judicial of recent investigators:
“The misery and squalor that surround us, the dying fire of hope in many millions of European homes, the injurious luxury of some wealthy families, the terrible uncertainty overshadowing many families of the poor—these are evils too plain to be ignored. By the knowledge that our science seeks it is possible that they may be restrained. Out of the darkness light! To search for it is the task, to find it, perhaps, the prize, which the ‘dismal science of Political-Economy’ offers to those who face its discipline.”[1]
“Out of the darkness light!” Surely, if in striving to reach
- ↑ The Economics of Welfare, p. vii, A. C. Pigou, M. A., Professor of Political Economy, Cambridge. Macmillan and Co., London, 1920.
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