Political-economists may claim that their careful examination of the precise products of several indeterminable factors has been conducted in a scientific manner and has many interesting results; but the scientist can only look on the whole performance as a morbid and useless diversion. What the latter misses is any hope of closing an equation, even in the most general terms.
Sanity, or wholeness—is not this, in the end, the confusing lack in economics; and is it not this lack which leaves such phenomena as interest, rent, taxation and currency absolutely unrelated to basic economic value, so that when a political-economist reasserts that the art of taxation is the art of getting the feathers without the squawk, we are almost disposed to grant him the rank of scientist without further question, though all he has earned is the rank of cynic?[1]
Under our present system the final determination of value is left to international owners of massed gold, while taxation,—the cost of overcoming resistance,—and currency,—the measure and pledge of value,—are still as subject to the whim of an uneducated legislator, guided perhaps by some sentimental dealer in political junk who wrongly calls himself an economist, as they were to the caprice or needs of an astute autocrat. All these authorities are likely to go wrong for totally different reasons: The controller of massed gold operates internationally: the legislator is not always held by scientific compunction: the political-economist[2] has no unit of value; and while politically we are free of the autocrat, we are, nevertheless, still jerked to our knees at intervals by the sudden strictures of the international gold-standard.
Because of lack of comprehension of the measurable basic factors of national value—land-area, population and time—many civilized countries today stand panic-struck. Essential
- ↑ This has been well pointed out by Dr. Rowland Estcourt in his “Conflict of Tax Laws,” page 128. University of California Publication in Economics, April 2, 1918.
- ↑ A very definite distinction should be drawn between the political economist and the economist proper. The political-economist, like the astrological-astronomer, the alchemistic-metallurgist, the centaur and the mermaid, is almost bound to disappear, as we recognise the dynamic significance of national equilibrium, or self-determination.
