Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1178

Carbon of letter from 310 Riverside Drive, New York City, to John H. Allen, president, Everlasting Valve Company, 49 Fiske Street, Jersey City, N.J.

December 12, 1935

Dear Mr. Allen:

I wish to thank you for your letter of some time ago with copy of your address reprinted from The Universal Engineer. I read this with great interest and have re-read it from time to time as your letter lay upon my desk awaiting my considerably delayed reply. I am particularly impressed with your quotation from Henry George^’s editorial in the “Standard” of January 21, 1888:  “it is not by the mere levying of a tax that we propose to abolish poverty: it is by securing the blessings of liberty.” I am profoundly convinced that we Single Taxers lay too much stress on the mere laying of our tax and not nearly enough upon our proposed grand emancipation of industry and productivity from the blight of restrictionism in its thousand forms as increasingly practiced by governments today. The chief obstacle to doing right, the only thing that makes it hard to do right, is our persistence in doing wrong. I think we have been too long content with vain repetitions. I think we ought to make our philosophy alive by carrying forward the application of its principles as Henry George trusted us to do. We ought to give more attention than we have done — more even than Henry George has done — to the infinitely vicious results that do and of a certainty must flow from the wrong kind of taxation. We ought to study and show not alone its destructiveness upon the economic life, but its effect upon government itself — how it not only establishes unemployment, creates monopolies, encourages speculation, but how the evils it breeds give excuse and occasion to multiply the bureaus and other destructive agencies of government to regulate and control the evils of its own making. And we ought to remember that just so far as the evils of wrong taxation can be fought down government can be cheapened and simplified, production liberated, and out of the enhanced value of government and the increased volume of wealth the actual payment of ground rent (not capitalized hopes) would pass far beyond the imperative needs for public revenue. In this situation the present objections to the utilization of rent for public purposes should largely disappear. The situation is this: The cost of government has been diminished and its value increased. Liberated productive enterprise (exchange of private services) is now in need of and in position to pay for a far greater amount of public services (public labor using public capital). But although the public services are now a highly profitable field of investment, private industry does not enter this field because the value and the profit from public services is reflected only in rents. This leaves this profitable field of public investment and administration wide open to those who hold rent-paying locations. These persons have funds to invest in public enterprises without any competition from private capital. Such investments by them, being wisely made and properly directed and supervised, should yield them in rents not only all the costs of the capital and labor which they have introduced into these additional public services but also a just compensation to themselves in proportion to the value of their services as supervisors and administrators. Such public administrators, of course, could not afford anything but an honest and efficient conduct of public services because any failure in this respect would diminish the revenue of their rent while every advance and improvement that they made in the conduct of the public enterprises would at the same time increase the compensation coming to them.

I think we single taxers should step out and take some cognizance of the tremendous creative potentialities that are latent in and only waiting to be developed out of the basic philosophy of Henry George. He has told us in language of ravishing beauty and poetic charm of what Liberty, partial liberty, in fitful gleams and glories has done for mankind, but he has trusted us to explore and discover in detail the beauties and perfections of that land of freedom towards which he has set our feet by proposing — “To abolish all taxation save that upon land values.”

I thank you for the kindness of your letter and hope we will have further contacts and communications.

Sincerely,