Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1143

Penciled by Heath in a Stenographer’s Note Book

August 17, 1947

 

Original => Item 9

     There is a kind of confused thinking or, more correctly, default of thinking, almost universal, even /among/ those most educated or best informed, under which it is assumed that proprietary or contractual authority over large capital or productive properties is somehow inimical to the liberties of the many who as patrons of large enterprises make themselves the prime voluntary beneficiaries of its productive administration. The social authority of comparatively few natural or corporate persons to own and thereby to administer large enterprises contractually and productively is constantly confused with its opposite, namely, with the political authority to coerce persons and seize and dissipate property and thereby to destroy its ownership and prevent its productive administration.

     This default of intellectual discrimination springs, on the one hand, from the age-old authoritarian propaganda that the more or less deified political and war-waging and slave-making powers of the world are, in virtue of their divine ordainment, the guardians of peace and freedom and the sole salvation from the tyrannies, slaveries and wars that can be perpetuated only by them. On the other hand, the reality of ownership and property as the antithesis of force and the instrument of contract — of all voluntary and mutually beneficial relationships — has been superficially obscured by the nature of its gradual evolution out of a precedent contrary condition of universal force and rapine. Civilization has developed only in the degree that relationships of violence and force have been superseded by those of amity and peace — only as the reciprocal, the societal, relationships of property and contract have displaced the one-sided and destructive political processes of violence and force.

(New start August 21, 1947)

     Nor is the common democratic ideal to be scorned. There has been no failure, no impeachment of the ideal itself. Only the crude and coercive methods for its attainment have failed. Even the most enlightened of men have put their trust in “reeking tube and iron shard” only so they be employed in the execution of a popular mandate or majority will or some otherwise sanctioned and sanctified cause. The popular franchise continues to be employed to elect new masters or re-elect old with commission to seize property, prescribe behavior and dominate the creative spirit and will of men who otherwise would be free. And all this is upheld under plea of necessity, for men have been too weak of mind to conceive that the unruly and destructive few could be punished or restrained without the creative energies of the peaceable and productive being similarly penalized, regulated and ruled. Yet the “democratic” ideal is fundamentally sound, a dream that must eventually come true in the proprietary community and there as beautifully serve and bless as in the political community it has signally failed and destroyed.

     When the owners of communities unite and their organization begins to protect the private property and liberties of the inhabitants as a public service to them, then out of the new freedom vouchsafed and the released productivity of their enterprises, both corporate and individual, the public organization will be recompensed by its income and values rising just in proportion that it thus publicly serves and that political coercion correspondingly declines. Thus to the owners will great profits accrue and values arise and be reflected in the market value of the shares in the community organization. By its protection and service to all other free enterprises it permits their productivity to rise. And thus rises the need and demand for more and more sites and resources and more and more ability to pay for them and for those previously occupied. This vastly increased activity at all levels must so multiply productivity that more and more kinds of commodities and services will come to be widely distributed and universally enjoyed. Facilities for mass production and for widely extended services will continue to rise out of the savings of larger and larger numbers of investors both small and large. Thus ownership and voting rights in great enterprises will become more and more widely diffused. Large scale production of established commodities and services will be the rule.

     But it is in the field of community services that the economy and efficiency of mass production methods will have the greatest application and most fruitful effect. For in this field the mass patronage is already established. The entire population, simply by its presence, participates in all these services and commodities that are or become abundantly appurtenant to the community itself. The proprietary public enterprise that owns the sites and resources and supplies goods and services appurtenant to them will distribute all these not to a scattered clientele of pur­chasers but to the entire population as perquisites of their occupancies. Nor will it have any problems of marketing and collections, for the money value of all the things that the proprietary organization furnishes so abundantly in the community that no “price rationing” is required will simply enhance the desirability of the sites and thus be added automatically to the general income of the proprietary enterprise. The efficiency of this form of mass production and distribution to entire populations must eventually exceed that of “private” enterprises

 

 

                                           /Breaks off/