Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1319

Carbon of a letter to H.B. Cowan, Director, International Research Committee on Real Estate Taxation, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

January 10, 1941

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Cowan:

I wish to thank you for acknowledging my Christmas Greetings and to congratulate you on the evident progress you have made towards the tax policy investigations you have been purposing to make in the Far Eastern antipodes.

I certainly wish you a great deal of pleasure and success in this undertaking and the full backing and cooperation of our most excellent committee.

As to the fact of land value taxation having been extensively and for a long time practiced, we all are fully aware. I dare say you will bring the published data more completely up to date and that you will gather opinions favorable to the policy of land value taxation and attributing many advantages and favorable results to that policy.

I hope, however, you will not take it amiss for me to suggest that in your travels and inquiries you give particular attention to the effects upon the security and equity of land users and occupiers where the distribution of sites and resources has been coming more and more under political authority and decree. We must, of course, realize that the full political appropriation of rent would take the distribution of sites and resources entirely out of determination of contractual engagements by free negotiation, and leave this matter entirely to the dis­positions of governmental authority. If it is better for the distribution of sites and resources to be carried out by political processes rather than by contractual engagements, some of the benefits of this extension of state power should begin to be apparent. I consider it important for us to weigh very carefully the possible disadvantages of a state allocation and administration of sites and resources. When your reports become available, I hope to find some treatment of this aspect of the matter.

I trust you will be interested in the point of view that I have entertained for some time, and is somewhat tersely set out in a letter, with its accompanying amplification that I sent to the Director of the Henry George School in New York a few months ago. There is material in this for some very serious thought. I hope in the course of your travels you will have opportunity of giving this material your earnest consideration, and that you will before very long let me know something of your intellectual reaction to it. I have great confidence in your judgment and analytical powers, and will look forward eagerly to hearing further from you.

Just to make sure that you will have with you some further and more complete elaboration of this important point of view, I am enclosing additional copies of some of the printed booklets to which I called your attention last year. The point of view presented in these is, of course, novel and radically different from what we have long been accustomed to, but I am sure you will agree with me that it merits the earnest consideration of the most competent minds.

I feel especially deprived, not to say aggrieved, at your having been in New York and Washington recently without opportunity of seeing me. I was very happy to renew our acquaintance in Toronto last summer, and hope I will be able to see you again before you start on your pilgrimage, or very soon after your return. I am pleased to know that the Toronto Single Taxers remember me, and hope to visit them again before very long.

With best and sincere wishes,

 

   

         Spencer Heath

 

 

 

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