Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1456

Draft for a letter from New York City to Mildred Loomis

May 6, 1949

 

 

Dear Mildred Loomis:

I have thought about you many times since that day long ago when we talked together at the Henry George School. You were kind enough to send me your round robin letter which finally grew into The Interpreter. It brought to me interesting accounts of your new life and doings at Lanes End, at Brookville, Ohio. It is good to know that you are getting so much happy satis­faction in pursuing your ideal and in doing so with so many happy associates.

My own point of view is so broad and inclusive and yet so simple and clear, taking in such a large view of human society that I do not have much company in it, especially since I am practically devoid of any spirit of propaganda except through the spoken word and not very aggressive at that.

Where I am most alone intellectually and esthetically is in this:  I have learned that in all her departments nature is constantly retiring those forms, organizations and institutions which are intrinsically least /able/ to serve and survive but her mode is not to destroy but to supersede the less enduring and less serving by better developed and more highly qualified forms of action and of being. I am therefore not antagonistic against anything that exists. I am very much in favor of understanding, enjoying and promoting all that side of nature, that larger side, which is in the ascendant. Now, the only way I know to distinguish between the ascendant dominant in nature from that which is recessive is by understanding them in terms of the general principle and not the particular action which is involved. For things of the highest principles and potentialities come into being with many crudities and deficiencies. We must look not to these but to the principle involved and which determines or rather describes the present mode of operation and determines the long-term results. It was the principle and not the deficiencies of the early automobile that determined its long-term operation. Those who attack nature’s more recent developments by reason of their initial deficiencies are simply barking up the wrong tree.

 Now the institution of the general exchange system is in high contrast to the almost universal totalitarianism of the ancient governments and slave states. The first dreamings of the world-wide relationship among men without force or coercion on either side which gave birth to the Christian era as a new and unprecedented hope for mankind, but this poet’s dream of a Heavenly Kingdom, even in parable, could not be understood. Nothing like it was ever heard before. So its followers formed a membership corporation setting themselves apart by arti­ficial test from the rest of mankind and in antagonism against the crude institutions of the Roman world. They were againsters looking for a miracle in their behalf, setting themselves against the current political powers that made the laws and wars. Hence it is not surprising that in the 4th century they were taken over by the power which they opposed, just as the modern communists and other revolutionists are taken over by those they fail to dislodge, just as those who oppose wars are thereby engulfed in them.

The modern system of unforced exchanges began to take form in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The Baltic and Mediterranean traders developed their own uniform practices by observance of which they were traders and by disregard of which they automatically ceased so to be. When this common law of custom was taken over and enforced with violence by the war-making sovereignties, this natural common law with modifications was enacted as political law after the manner of slave governments. This natural common law, this adoption of golden-rule relationships became the political law known as the Law Merchant. Ancient piracy and slavery had transformed itself, and then it was taken over increasingly under the tyranny of governmental restriction, regulation and control.

Something similar has happened to those who owned and traded in land. Until the end of the Eighteenth Century they were only nominally landlords; actually they were tax lords, for in no other hands was there any other power to levy taxes or tribute on any widespread or wider scale. They and they alone possessed any general powers to lay taxes, enact and enforce laws, make and wage wars. But early in the 19th Century all this was changed. Landowners lost all their sovereign powers. Property in land became the non-violent distributing agency under whose operation under the general market the titles to land and thereby its peaceable distribution and use became available to all persons, regardless of religion, race or rank upon substantially identical terms. And the land value or rent rendered by the voting democracy of the market be­came the spontaneous recompense for this vitally important public service of distribution, however unconsciously performed. Even when exacting the highest rent offered for a particular site or resource, the landlord unwittingly served his community more than himself. For in this manner the particular property necessarily fell into the hands of him who could be most productive with it and thereby most enrich the general markets and there­by the general membership of the community. Even the holder of unused lands provides a standby and safe­guard service against the day when enough business can be done (under government and taxation) to bring the particular land into use. For without the owner the then occupancy of the land could be determined only by unorganized violence or under political authority with the tyranny thereby entailed.

 

Free trade in land like any other free trade is not a process of production, it is a process of distribution. The recompense received in trade is the recompense for distribution whether production has or, as in the case of mere land, has not been previously involved. It is the high or low social utility of a thing, as determined by the market, which governs the amount of recompense the market will award for the peaceable distribution of that thing. The only alter­native would be violence or tyranny with respect to pos­session of that thing.

The general exchange system or market is the institutionalization of the golden rule constituting the Kingdom of Heaven (Kingdom of Creation) among men. It gives them the power to create and recreate progressively the physical world in which they live, to make environment more favor­able to themselves and thereby extend their average life span. This transforms the current of human life in its successive generations from one of high frequency of death and replacement as in the Orient to one of lower and lower frequency as in the Western World.

 

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