Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1287

Carbon of a letter from Heath in New York, to Richard T. Ely, 551 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York

October 28, 1939

Dear Doctor Ely:

Ever since seeing you the last time, I have been expecting to read several of your books of which mention has been made, particularly your Outline of Economics in its latest edition. Much traveling around has delayed me in this, but during the last ten days which I have spent here in New York, I found an opportunity of going through your Outline and also giving some attention to your earlier works. I regret to say that I have not yet gotten around to your biographical work with its very intriguing title of Ground Under Our Feet. This reminds me of a paragraph that I lifted from your Land Policies published in 1922, as follows:

In an ideal system of land ownership there will be an endeavor to create in the land owner a feeling that land ownership carries with it a social mission 

The necessity for a reexamination of fundamental notions about taxation is becoming increasingly pressing. Underlying economic conditions, social and economic maladjustments, are being revealed with increasing clarity by the strain to which our economic system is being put in these trying years of political and economic reconstruction. The crying need is for cool, dispassionate thinking. The problem of taxation in the modern state can properly receive much more attention than is at present being given it from persons willing and able to make critical and unprejudiced examination of some of the hundred-years old theories which many of us have too long been accepting without much question.

     This quotation strikes me very forcibly since it seems to show your early cognizance of this important field for exploration in connection with the institution of private property in land and the social meaning which is implied in it. This is something that I have tried very hard to bring out, and it seems to me I have found it a very fruitful field of examination. As you know, I am trying to give expression and ultimate publicity to the fact that land owners are the only public authority in a community whose transactions with the members or population of the community are conducted solely on the basis of voluntary exchange without resort to any compulsory levies such as taxation, etc. In this view, the institution of private property in land supplies the community with a social means of distribution of the security which the recognition of the institution provides, and the peaceable use and access to the public parts of the community and all the facilities provided therein. This sets the land-owning interest as the purveyors of community security and community benefits by the same merchandising process that is implied by the land lords who purvey similar security and services within a hotel or other community establishment. In these lesser communities, the owners provide not only security and access to the common facilities, but they also protect their tenants against all compulsory levies or other depredations on the part of community employees, or other members of the community. The function of community ownership, therefore, seems to be much further developed in the smaller communities than in the larger ones which lie wholly out of doors.

     Nevertheless, it still seems to me that private property in land is almost the sole barrier that lies between the population of a community and the unbridled exercise of a compulsory authority over it by its public servants and employees. It is my thought that in the extension of the functioning of land ownership lies the most promising, if not the only escape that is possible for modern communities out of the bankruptcy and disintegration that is now confronting them.

     If upon consideration you feel that I am drawing attention to an important field of investigation, I hope the world may yet have the benefit of some contribution from you in that general direction. It would please me very much to know how these matters seem to appeal to you, and to hear something from you in regard to them either in writing or, still more agreeably, by some further brief visit together.

     I shall be in New York another day or two before returning to my home in Maryland. If it should be convenient for you to lunch with me Tuesday or Wednesday, I am sure I will enjoy it very much. A telephone message to my hotel (University 4-2700) naming the day and the hour would be sufficient.

     Please give Mrs. E1y my compliments upon her many interests and capacities, and her delightful hospitality.

                        Sincerely yours,