Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1454

Letter to Arthur C. Holden, 57 West 78th Street, New York City

July 16, 1949

 

 

Dear Mr. Holden:

 

     Having some dates with my daughters and others at Virginia Beach and Winchester, Virginia, I am spending the greater part of July in these parts. But I have been remembering with pleasure the hospitality of your mind with respect to what seem to me the actualities of public or community administration so far as it has as yet socially evolved.

     I refer primarily to the present existing and actually operating mode of public administration under which the owners of the real — the fixed and permanent — property that constitutes a community (a place having common defense) make a contractual (uncoerced) allocation of the sites and resources. This is the basic public service without which there could be no occupancy or use except upon terms arbi­trarily prescribed and coercively enforced by some domina­ting political power. This public service is the social usufruct arising from the owners each pursuing his own interest through voluntary and rational (measured) ex­change relationships with their fellow men. The recompense that they receive currently for this basic public service is ground rent; its capitalization, land value.

     The community owners are not as yet among themselves in any established contractual or organic relationship. Their unity is entirely functional (all being distribu­tors) instead of organic; hence they are rivals competing in the general market for tenants or purchasers — within the politically limited and therefore usually small effec­tive demand. Although their services to the public are not conscious or deliberate, they are nevertheless, in effect, protective against the utmost exactions and oppres­sions of the political authority — so far as property in land is permitted or remains undestroyed.

     While the community owners remain thus unorganized and the political authority increasingly taxes away the freedom to exchange and with it the incentive to produce and thereby diminishes the demand for land, the services of land owners are less and less needed and their incomes and values thus progressively decline. When land owners deliberately and effectively unite for common service to and protection of the populations who occupy their communities they will thereby create rents and values in proportion to the social need and the utility of the protection and services thus consciously (and for profit) performed. There will then be a growing proprietary public authority thriving on the public protection it affords and the public services it performs. And this non-political public authority, in its localized units, will become competent not only to serve and protect but also to administer profitably the existing public capital and improvements, but also /and/ to carry out profitably vast re­constructions and modernizations of the community pro­perties of all kinds.

     I am convinced that the physical and material achieve­ments that characterize and distinguish modern civiliza­tion have resulted solely from the historically recent evolution and development of the property, and thereby of the contractual, relationship among men. Hence I believe that ideal plans such as you have made for the development of the physical community await for their realization only the practical business (proprietary) organization necessary and competent profitably and continuously to carry them out.

Sincerely,