Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1321

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Warren S. Blauvelt, 816 Hill Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan

January 11, 1941

 

 

Dear Mr. Blauvelt:

 

It is a great pleasure to have your letter of January 8^th reminding me of our meeting in Detroit, and the situation with respect to the progressive teaching of social science in the state educational machine.

 

     I am especially gratified at your request for some additional copies of my “The Inspiration of Beauty.” I am happy to send these to you. I am also sending my “Private Property in Land Explained” and “Questions for the Consideration of Land Owners.”

 

     You will note that I have given a functional interpretation of the phenomenon of property which is a radical departure from the static conception of property entertained by Herbert Spencer, J.S. Mill, Henry George and many others. As in all sciences, the functional view is, of course, by far the most realistic and necessarily the last developed. I regard property in an organized and functioning society as the necessary means of accumulating and distributing services by the free processes of exchange. In an exchange economy all property that is not in process of being consumed is in process of service or exchange. Since one cannot sell or exchange anything except what he owns, ownership is essential to all the social uses of property and services. I say social uses in contradistinction to the political administration of property which must necessarily be coercive and compulsive and without any of the democratic freedom which characterizes contractual engagements, and the exchange processes of the market.

 

     The questions addressed to land owners are for the purpose of bringing into sharp focus their position as the necessary recipients of the values to be created by the cessation of governmental disservices and to suggest the high desirability to them of making their communities more inhabitable and more highly productive by mitigation of state taxation with all its destructive effects directly and indirectly. Since they as land owners have no other business or concern but to look after the protection and other interests and services of their present and prospective tenants or purchasers, and since all services to the community will be recompensed directly to the land owners, it is highly appropriate and desirable to all and, particularly, to them that they should finance and administer all community affairs. The matters suggested in these questions have been expanded into a thirty-two-page booklet under the general title, “Real Estate: How to Raise and Restore Its Income and Value” with the sub-title, “The Administration of Property as Community Services.”

 

     Please let me know if, upon examination of the questions which I have propounded to land owners, you would like to have a copy of the more fully expanded discussion of the administration of real estate by means of community services. If so, I shall be very happy to send it to you as well as additional copies of anything I have looking to the practical application of the philosophy of freedom proposed by Henry George.

 

     I am now making my principal headquarters at my country place near Baltimore. Maryland where I hope to receive further communication from you in the near future. If you are moving about the country and visiting the vicinity of Washington or New York, I shall take delight in any opportunity of further personal acquaintance with you.

                       

Very truly yours,

 

 

    Spencer Heath

 

 

SH:ML

 

Enc. 4 “Inspiration of Beauty”

     1 “Private Property in Land Explained”

     1 “Questions for the Consideration of Land Owners”