Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1062

Penciling on three-hole, ring-binder paper

Fall 1933?

Original -> 1057

When the owners of locations have the wisdom to regard their contributions to the cost of government services as creative investments and, so regarding them, contribute also administrative labors in the protection of the public funds and the efficient direction of the public services, they will by this form of labor vastly enhance the values and the revenues of the locations they control — all this in addition to the restoration of land values that must follow the emancipation of all land-using and rent-paying productive interests from the burden and support of government, corrupt, wasteful and destructive as it now is.

Such assumption of the administrative function by land-owner investors in government as the mechanism of public service would bring into being a ruling class who in the creation of the highest revenues for themselves would by the very same acts and policies advance in the highest degree the welfare of their community as a whole — a very great contrast, indeed, with the present state of affairs in which the administration of the public funds and services is chiefly in the hands of political gangs the interests and activities of whose members are almost wholly opposed to and destructive of the public welfare.

The management of government and its services by a class of administrators whose every interest would be in the conservation of costs and the creation of values through the employment of their personal and pecuniary resources in the public services will introduce and justify the normal and rational concept of government as a spontaneous growth and wholly creative agency of social pro­gress and security. Under such creative organization the pecuniary obligations of land owners becomes their opportunity, and duty merges with desire. The land-owning class itself becomes transformed.

Under emancipation from the burden of government and from the blight of trade monopolies and special privileges to which it lends its power, private business will advance to a prosperity of which we can hardly dream. However, those persons most highly gifted with taste and talent for the creation of public services and values will be drawn away from private enterprise and led to invest their resources and talents in land values and those public enterprises and activities by which these values are enhanced. In the like manner, those skilled and gifted in the administration and enhancement of private values will be drawn away from land ownership and the public business to engage in private affairs.