the principles of the science of economics—if it is a science—could be applied on 1,000 acres of barren rock, given available population and time, and barring a political boycott.
Before the effect of the liberation of all three essential economic factors could be measured—so loose has been our thinking—there has arisen much advocacy for a scheme to hand back to the Government the control of men’s labor and time, without even an attempt to free land to individual control and utilize all three factors. It may be said that land is free in this and many other countries; but such is not the case; it is not free from fear of the uncertainties of arbitrary taxation: it is not free from the penalizing of attempts to improve it, nor is it free from the fear of confiscation. Owing to the lack of any impersonal scientific basis for taxation, it is subject on one hand to arbitrary favoritism and on the other to arbitrary pressure, exactly as commerce under autocratic control was either unduly aided or unduly hampered. Land is not free, since economically it does not know where it stands.
We centered our attack against the individual autocrat rather than against the means which autocracy employed to interfere with our freedom of motion, and as a consequence we have never looked very closely into the question whether we were actually or economically free, or only potentially or politically free, with this freedom still to be utilized in striving for sane adjustment.
We continue to employ the whole machinery of autocracy for the benefit of favored groups, under the theory of tariff for protection, blind to the fact that it is profits we are protecting; and for the avoidance of just incidence of taxation under the revenue theory, without any realization that a tariff against goods, as Jean-Baptiste Say so clearly shows,[1] is a legalized depreciation of the value of certain domestic products, since the value of these is measured by what can be obtained for them. This applies particularly to the products of the farmer and the gold-miner, who must seek an exterior market.
- ↑ “A Treatise on Political Economy,” J.-B. Say. 6th edition, 1836, Chapter 17. Translated by C. R. Princep, M.A. Grigg and Ellis, Philadelphia.
