We had some safeguards under our constitution but many of these we have lightly destroyed. These were very simple and vital political considerations—not economic.
If it were not for the fact that political economy has gained such a long start over the exact sciences, and so much longer a start over that method of providing for national equilibrium which we call democracy, there would be no need for more than a few lines to state a logical case; but the political-economists have gathered up so large a number of the interesting feathers, which have fallen from so many political dodos, that an attempt to dispute their findings is very much like an abdominal operation upon a feather bed.
The case is this: the desire of individual freedom in the medium of space and matter gives rise to effort, and the effectiveness, or value, of this effort is inversely proportional to the resistance of the area in which it is exerted. To contend that this effective effort, or value, can be stated, measured, and justly recompensed in terms of gold is not conservative: it is superstitious. To contend that it can be measured in terms of commodities is not scientific: it is a surrender to eternal trial and error. To contend that it can be measured in terms of energy-hours is not radical: it is aimless. Such value cannot be scientifically determined until every factor of value, positive and negative, has been taken into the calculation, and can then only be measured in terms of the area in which it operates, as modified by population-density and time. In the name of science, how else?
We took over from autocracy two deplorable arbitraries, both of which vitiate any scientific attempt to measure value. One was predatory taxation, to provide the cost of general facilities which give reality to value. The other was gold, an arbitrary means of measuring value. To attempt to improve the means of measuring value, without paying any attention to taxation, an obvious means of impairing both the value and the measure, is far less scientific than it would be to install a recording timing-device on a high-speed dynamo and then permit a well-meaning idiot to amuse himself by playing with the brake.
