Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1262

Carbon of a letter to Clifford H. Kendal, Land and Freedom, 150 Nassau Street, New York NY

August 23, 1939

Dear Mr. Kendal:

Your letter of the 22nd at hand, and I enclose my check for Two Dollars ($2.00), regular subscription rate as you suggest. Didn’t I ask you to send the magazine to somebody else at my expense? Seems to me I did.

     I note you are sorry I didn’t like your Comment and Reflection. How do you get that way? I believe your Comment and Reflection is just about the only part of the magazine that I did not pull to pieces in my long letter to you reviewing almost everything else in it. When you read me some of your Comment and Reflection in advance of publication, I told you that it was fine and I am sticking to it.

     I almost wonder that Mr. McNally has not offered you some material for publication. I suggest that you ask him to do so — either to submit original articles or to give you his comments on what has already been accomplished. I think Mr. McNally’s views and reactions will be very similar to my own.

     There is no getting away from the fact that Land and Freedom has been and remains a journal of propaganda. By this I mean that there are a number of entirely unproved sociological conceptions which this journal and its contributors take absolutely for granted and any questioning of which they are strongly disposed to resent and resist. Among them are: 1. The Ricardian law. 2. The idea that wages necessarily go down when rent goes up.

3. That rent is paid for natural resources — that rent is paid for land as land and not for the exchange services that give exchange value to land. 4. That taxation imposed upon the owners of idle land will force that idle land into use. 5. That the full taxation of the rent coming from the land that is not idle would not be sufficient to destroy all the present or prospective value of land that is not in use. 6. That the rent belongs to the people who pay it and not to those who exchange their services for it — to the people who get public services by paying for them and not to those who provide the services. 7. That rent can be taken in taxes and still remain rent — and still be measured by contract, consent and exchange the same as rent is. 8. That it is that voluntary payment of rent, and not the arbitrary seizure of taxes that degrades capital and labor, so that “women faint and little children moan.” 9. That private property in land is the curse of civilization instead of being the greatest limitation that has ever been imposed upon arbitrary governmental power.

     It is rarely, if ever, that an article has appeared in Land and Freedom without propagandizing for some one or more of these nine assumptions. If any question of any one of them even faintly arises such question is put down as either stupid or sinful and against all the laws of God and the authority of Henry George.

     Henry George himself on page thirteen of Progress and Poverty says, “I propose in this inquiry to take nothing for granted, but to bring even accepted theories to the test.” On page 168 he writes, “Fortunately, as to the law of rent there is no necessity for discussion. Authority here coincides with common sense, and the accepted dictum of the current political economy has the self-evident character of a geometric axiom.”

     Again on page 13 he writes, “I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon us is the responsibility of seeking the law . . . But what that law may prove to be is not our affair.” At the bottom of page 404 he writes, “Hence it will not be enough merely to place all taxes on the value of land. It will be necessary . . . to increase the amount demanded in taxation, and to continue this increase as society progresses and rent advances. But this is so natural and easy a matter, that it may be considered as involved, or at least understood, in the proposition to put all taxes on the value of land. . . . I have been for some years endeavoring to popularize this proposition.”  (The emphasis is mine.) From this it appears that although he proposed at the outset of his book to take nothing for granted and to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead, it nevertheless led him to the identical proposition that he had been endeavoring to popularize for some years.

     In hanging on to the Malthusian doctrine in its Ricardian form, Henry George gives us the perfect example of what Lord Morley referred to when he said that seldom does a discoverer of new truth fail to carry forward enough of the error of his predecessors to vitiate his own discoveries. It was a fatal error of his pre­decessor, Ricardo, that has vitiated and held back the essential truths propounded and natural relationships discovered by Henry George. And it is the more remarkable that he consciously swallowed the Ricardian application of the Malthusian theory as shown on page 229 where he states “Thus the two theories, as I have before explained, are made to harmonize and blend, the law of rent becoming but a special application of the more general law propounded by Malthus, and the advance of rents with increasing population a demonstration of its resistless operation.”

     It was Ricardo who made it difficult for George to progress to any higher ground than that upon which he condemned private property in land. Just as Ricardo held back the thought and conception of Henry George, so does Henry George hold back the thought and conception of those who feel a greater loyalty to the error he transmitted than to the truth he tried to make clear.

     I appreciate your continued interest in that short history of the world. I am thinking of calling it, “Slavery, Tribute and Taxation throughout History.” The spirit has been moving me toward its completion, but has not yet moved me enough.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

Spencer Heath