If such conceptions seem untenable to practical-minded materialists who would measure value by its visible products, support may be claimed from two widely separated authorities, the economist and the physicist.
The National Bureau of Economic Research states as follows:
“When, for example, a city taxes its inhabitants to pay school teachers the people presumably get value received for their money, and there is no more reason why we should deduct school taxes from individual incomes than why we should deduct the fees paid by the rest of the community to physicians.”[1]
Trautwine states:
“Thus in pumping water, the work done in overcoming the friction of the pump is said to be lost or prejudicial, while the useful work would be represented by the product (weight of water × height to which it is lifted). The distinction, although artificial, and somewhat arbitrary, is often a very convenient one; but the work is of course not actually ‘lost’ and still less is it ‘prejudicial’; for the water could not be delivered without first overcoming the resistance. A merchant might as well call that portion of his money lost which he expends for clerk-hire, etc.”[2]
In the phraseology of science, the measurable value of effort is equal to the resistance overcome; and, since resistance overcome is obviously the first move toward freedom, this is only the impersonal equivalent of the basic economic equation already put forward, namely:
Value = EffortResistance = Freedom
Now “freedom” is a large quantity—probably far larger than we dream, even though we have done much dreaming. If we have freedom beyond conception it follows that we have a possible flow of economic value beyond conception. As a
