Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/77

Value^[1] (The sum, in terms of a fluctuating unit of value, of all the annual power bills of the United States):

Commodity (The products due to the utilization of electric power which are available for exchange):

Labor (The number of fluctuating units of value shown on the consolidated pay-rolls of all companies, with some question as to whether the engineers and managers should be included):

Land (Let us say the total conducting medium employed for controlling, concentrating and redistributing the power, with much emphasis on its composition); and

Capital (The number and price, in terms of a fluctuating unit of value, of all new and second-hand generators, transformers and motors, as well as almost everything else already included in Wealth and Commodity, even if we ignore the quarrel between those who would include Land, and those who won’t).

 

This generous list of so-called elemental factors is enough to keep the electrician calculating aimlessly for the rest of his life. Yet they are as parallel as may be to the medley of factors that preoccupy the economist. He may insist upon using them with devout and tremulous hands—but he must not insist upon our interest in his findings.

The electrician would brush all these away and would call for his well-calibrated instruments of precision which are nothing more than elaborations of the foot-rule, the balance and the chronometer. He would request the economist to take away his inventory and guess again at available energy by making some toast for the next meal on the electric toaster, and calling it capital, his prime factor.

At this juncture it is advisable to give the reader rest by changing the picture. In trying, with the best intentions in the world, to extricate an economist politely, the rescuer sooner or later goes down for the third time into the weedy depths with the struggling object of his pity and is lost. The results are a

1. This characterization of value would not be fair if Jevons himself had not ranked it with commodity, wealth, labor, land and capital.