section of our own smoothly-surfaced structure and ascertain what abnormal pressure is the cause of our opulent social domes, and what shifting quicksands are responsible for our macadamized depressions.
Economic law is universal; but with incalculable factors of political friction we dare not link the world’s power plants. What we may do, to our advantage, is to look for significant common symptoms, however varied in intensity, and realize in the light of human experience that the most prostrate of nations may be nearest recovery, since for these natural pressure, at terrific cost, has accomplished the cross-section exposure that the ritualistic economic practitioner refuses to countenance.
Rathenau, crushing everything that looked like optimistic illusion, and embracing personally all the woe of his fellow-countrymen, failed, perhaps, to realize that the large economic output and the meager reward he held out as his nation’s destiny were not necessarily coupled.[1] If economic law bears any relation to the laws of dynamics, the reward need not be meager, for it is probable that a tenfold output could be attained by eliminating the friction of arbitrary taxation and impairable currency. The margin upon which Rathenau was calculating was the paltry surplus of a choked system.
With an unimpairable national medium of exchange there can be no question that internal activity would be quickened in any country. In this sense economic law is universal; but with arbitrary barriers interposed between international exchanges of effort, economic law is wilfully repudiated and no appeal to such law can be logically taken.
Free flow, “No economic barriers,” or, in idealistic phrasing, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is still one of the essential conditions, even in the realm of economics, on which hangs all law—to say nothing of prophecy!
- ↑ See Chapters V and VI. “The New Society,” Walter Rathenau. Translated by Arthur Windham. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1921.
