Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1014

Notes for a letter to Mrs. Ethyl Clyde, at No. 1 Fifth Avenue, New York City, which was never sent

July 1943

Dear Mrs. Clyde:

Before considering the pro-social or the contra-social effects of the posthumous devolution of property, it is well to remind ourselves that we are considering property and the ownership of it in relation to the welfare of a Society. We are therefore not considering property or ownership in any situation, in any relationship

                             /Breaks off and starts again/

 

 

Of property and its ownership there are two precisely opposite and contradictory practices and conceptions. One is pre-social and primitive, the other civilized and social.

    The primitive practice and conception of property is to exclude others from its possession or use. All such property is obtained, held or possessed, by whatever means, only for the use of its owner and not for the use of others in general by sale, lease or exchange. The popular and general conception of property is in this exclusive sense. It is even held as a ideal in the slogan, “production for use and not for profit.”

    Ownership in the civilized or social sense is not exclusive but inclusive. In a social community, as distinguished from a tribal one, practically all services and properties are communized or socialized by being placed in the common markets and thus in the service of persons generally, either without limits for a price or for limited periods of time for a rent, wage (in the case of services) or other income. The property or services so communized or social-ized is in part placed directly in the use or possession of others. In other large part the property or services is so administered as to prepare or produce other property or services for the direct use of others and is thus owned and administered indirectly for the use and benefit of others. All the private property and services in a community (except that which a man employs for his own con­sumption or use) is employed either directly for the limited or unlimited use of others, or indirectly in the preparation of property or services for the limited or unlimited use of others; or it remains unemployed without profit, rent, wages or other income to its owner who holds it for the future if not for the present use of others or persons generally.

     Property and services cannot be put (for long) to the use of others without recompense.

     The services performed by owners (directly or by others and ratified) are called administrative. Their recompense, net above all costs, is called profit. The recompense for services performed by non-owners (of property), if general in character and not measured directly by the time or by specific items of service are called salaries. The recompenses for specific items of service are called fees and commissions. The recom­penses for services that are measured and gauged on the basis of the time given to performing them are called wages. The recompense for the unlimited use of specific property or of any part or interest in specific property is called price. The recompense for a limited use (as to time) of any specific property is called (always) rent. The recompense for use of credit or generalized property and services — claims against the general market — is called interest.

     Administrative services are of two kinds: (1) Those performed in the preparation of properties or goods (or services) for the service or use of others, commonly called production, and (2) Those performed in the transfer and allocation of ownership of property or goods or services to others, commonly called distribution, by a social technique called contractual.

     Both of these two kinds of services are recompensed in the rent or price paid for the limited or unlimited use of any kind of property that is produced and also distributed.

 

     There is, however, one kind of property as to which no services of production are ever performed — the sites and resources, gifts of nature, the common general advantages, of a community. Ownership of these properties is the first established and first recorded in any community, and since their owners cannot perform any services in the production of them, the only administrative service they can perform is that of distribution — that of making a social, a contractual, distribution of them so that all can have access to and use of them democratically, that is, upon equal terms.

    

     In confiding the administration of its lands and resources and things of common use or advantage to proprietary instead of political public officers, the population of a community insures itself alike against the anarchy and insecurity of the occupants taking and maintaining their own possession and the tyranny of an arbitrary or at least invidious distribution by a political and therefore compulsive authority.

 

     Moreover, by the exercise of its social instincts in placing the distribution of sites and resources in the hands of an owning or proprietary authority, the population secures for itself not only a peaceable, contractual and consensual administration of them but also their highest productivity and the greatest flow of common wealth into its general market.