Introduction
insist on logical structure, or unvarying foundations capable of supporting such a structure? This general lack of interest is not exhibited in other sciences; but wage-earners, farmers, traders, manufacturers and bankers, who must all suffer sooner or later the consequences of poor economic engineering, still dodge the professional economist, likable as he may be, as though he were a dogmatic theologian.
Let us take the most urgent problems to which the science of economics should be applied, namely, those of taxation, the basic insurance of order; of value, the consequence of effort within a region of order; and of currency, the measure of this value. We now have taxation based upon need, effort and ability, in intricate and arbitrary ratios; while value is tied tightly, and currency loosely, to gold, first, because gold was originally regarded as more stable in quantity than the good-faith of some irresponsible autocrat, and, second, because gold is even more malleable than we dreamed and has, under the political exigencies of democracy, a capacity for being beaten very thin and used for gilding in times of scarcity. As against these deplorable survivals of political bondage, we have the general knowledge that taxation is the pro rata responsibility of dispersed sovereignty for order: that order is a prerequisite of value; while the device of currency is clearly an attempt to measure the resulting value and make it negotiable, or, in other words, to provide that the freedom which arises from effective effort should have equal weight in time and space within our national domain.
Fundamentally, then, currency, value and taxation are integrally related, since currency is a measure of value, and value is a consequence of effort, modified by the cost of order; and yet, today, the volume of our currency is governed by a small and uncontrollable sum of gold; while taxation is imposed upon effort, which it tends ultimately to diminish. Such considerations as these force one to realize that some of the accepted rudiments of scientific method are absent from much that is termed economics.
To gain a hearing in a field where there is no audience and a long list of speakers is a difficult problem; and the method may
xvii
