Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1188

Carbon of letter to Charles G. Baldwin from 310 Riverside Drive, New York City

October 27, 1936

Dear Charles G.:

I ought to apologize for my long delay in making answer to your kind letters but I won’t, more than to say that for nearly a week I was confined to my room, mostly in bed, with some kind of influenza that kept me weak and miserable. The rest of it is just my perverse ineptitude as a correspondent.

However I have brought to light again the copy I made of your memorandum on some of my ideas that you wrote while you were up here and have made some notes on it indicating my reactions to some of its parts. I am happy to say that these and similar ideas are getting some serious consideration by a small group of old line single taxers, including Joseph D. Miller, Stephen Bell, Clifford Kendal, Benjamin Burger, and a few others. They have been meeting with me each Thursday evening for six or seven weeks and I feel that I have made very good progress with them. After this week we will meet in the rooms of the Town Hall Club on 43rd Street where I am a member. In this more central location they say they expect to increase their attendance considerably. I have only invited Messrs. Miller and Kendal and Burger and such persons as they might wish to invite. They have been sending out their own notices and invitations and some of the people attending have seemed greatly interested and to be people well worth talking to.

Regarding the possibility that landed proprietors joined together in a democratic organization for the production and sale of public services (land values) might practice some kind of race discrimination, I do not apprehend that this could enter into the matter of selling public services to any greater extent than it now enters into the sale of private services and commodities. Different neighborhoods would attract different types of populations and social classes. This natural tendency would be encouraged by the land owning administrators of government services by providing the kinds and types of services most agreeable to the respective kinds of populations and therefore productive of the highest rents in each locality. Moreover, only those persons who could make the most productive use of public services could afford to occupy those localities where the largest investments in public capital had been made and the highest type and grade of public services performed. Only such persons would have need of such services and be sufficiently productive to pay for them at a profit to themselves. In any event, the only good business on the part of the landed administrators would be to so conduct and distribute the public services as to make the populations most prosperous and productive in their places of business and most happy and contented in their places of residence. In no other way could the highest rents be obtained. In no other way could the administrative margin be made so great, that is, the spread between the ordinary costs of public services and the gross sales of them as expressed in rent. The sale of public services when properly organized under democratic-proprietary administration will be carried on under precisely the same sound principles as govern the successful administration of any private business and the production and sale of any private services or commodities. The great lag in social development has been in the failure to bring the distribution of public services within the principle of social exchange at market values. The services are being paid for, not by consent and agreement but by the seizure of private property and private services, and these seizures, themselves anti-social, and the anti-social uses to which they are put, destroy the demand for and ability to pay for public services, besides greatly impairing the quantity and quality and the value of the public services themselves. This is because public servants are now without any responsible (standing to lose) administration and supervision and therefore have unlimited coercive power. A government financed by seizures is hard to distinguish from organized piracy when socially accepted by people who have never known anything else.

Many thanks for your kindly interest in my feeble attempts to carry the basic principles of Henry George into a much wider field of application — and all the best in the way of personal regards to yourself and Mrs. Baldwin.

Sincerely,