nomics is a science), we are also under this elementary obligation.
Much deadening socialistic legislation becomes unnecessary if communism is given its proper place in our unit of value (exactly as it is in the foot-pound-second, which must express all value before it attempts to measure part).
In considering the measurement of value we cannot escape communism first or last, and it seems far preferable to have it first and have done with it. Our Labor Unions which demand a larger number of units of value as fast as, or faster than, they deteriorate: our much reviled agricultural bloc, smarting under a system of taxation which makes a serf of the farmer: our socialists and single-taxers: our advocates of guilds and soviets: our Federal Reserve System with its bitterly contested and cautious extensions of value: Irving Fisher with his commodity unit which aims bravely, like a small-town emporium, at comprehensiveness—these, first or last, are all subconscious attempts at a necessary rectification of our notion of value.[1]
We now thwart effort and defraud thrift by an irrelevant incompetent and material unit, and waste our time deploring bureaucratic interference.
Comprehensiveness we must have, either by pre-acceptance or costly adjustment.[2] If we provide for basic equity at the outset we can thereafter delight ourselves with the profitable flow of untrammelled and highly differentiated individuality
- ↑ Compare page 166.
- ↑ Jevons, in his essay, “The Future of Political Economy” (“The Principles of Economics,” page 202, Macmillan and Co., London, 1905) quotes Mr. Gladstone as follows: “It appears to me, at least, that perhaps the question of the currency is one in which we are still, I think, in a backward condition; our legislation having been confined in the main to averting great evils rather than to establishing a system which, beside being sound, would be complete and logical. With that exception, perhaps, not much remains in the province of direct legislation.”
With that exception! If it were not obviously veiled perception it would be magnificent irony. Suppose we paraphrase very briefly: “The engineer’s method of measuring the value of a mass in motion by crushing out the lives of widows and orphans, leaves something to be desired. With that exception we have done fairly well without the foot-pound-second.”
