Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1368

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Edwin H. Spengler, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, New York

March 12, 1941

 

 

 

Dear Doctor Spengler:-

 

     This is just a note of pleasant recollection that I have been carrying since we had a bit of lunch and conversation together a few weeks ago. It was a very great pleasure to meet you personally and get the benefit of some of your ideas on the present condition of national and world affairs, and to communicate to you some of my own. I have many times wished I could have more of your interesting conversation and pleasing personality.

 

     Quite a number of matters are bringing me to New York for the week of March 17^th. Among them is a fortnightly seminar on the Philosophy of Science under the auspices of Dr. William M. Malisoff, who is editor of the outstanding scientific publication (periodical) under that name. This seminar will be held on Friday night — the fourth meeting, I think. I wonder if you would like to attend. The “charter” members are permitted to bring one guest each. While most of the members are either scientists or philosophers, there is a considerable element of artists, musicians and the like.

 

     Since seeing you I have been presenting my “discoveries” regarding the proprietary administration of property and the peculiar need for and applicability of that type of administration to public and community affairs to a number of persons and organizations more or less prominent in the real estate field in New York and also among the officers and members of the real estate board in Baltimore.

 

     It is difficult to draw people’s minds away from the current conceptions of political government, even though these conceptions are totally foreign to those we hold with regard to all other services and affairs. Proprietary administration is old and customary and generally approved with respect to all private services and with respect to community services when they are on a small scale, as in a hotel or the like. The idea is new only with respect to municipal and governmental services. But once an intelligent person’s mind can be bent to the new application of the old principle or, rather, to its further extension into public affairs, it can go very far.

It surprises me that no one has resolved before me the striking and painful paradox between private services, individual or community, being conducted by contract and consent — and not being conducted successfully in any other way — and the phenomenon of all the public and governmental “services” being financed by coercion and indirection and being administered compulsively without any view to or any result of creating a revenue of its own.

The need for extending the social technique, practiced through the social technique of contractual engagements, into the public and governmental field seems utterly patent, and the practicability of this being done by the proprietary interests in a community becomes more and more obvious the more it is considered and discussed. It seems to be the only proposal ever brought forward for the improvement of public affairs that involves no destruction, correction or reform but only an extension of the success­ful operation of the institutions we already have.

While I am in New York, I shall be very happy if I have an opportunity of again seeing you. I shall be at the Hotel Woodstock, 127 West 43^rd Street (Bryant 9-3000), as usual, and shall be happy to hear from you there.

Please accept my best compliments and personal regards.

Sincerely yours,

 

  Spencer Heath

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