Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1457

Carbon of a letter from Heath to J. Rupert Mason, 1920 Lake Street, San Francisco 21, California

July 17, 1949

Dear Mr. Mason:

     Thank you for remembering me all these years and for your card of inquiry as to progress in my efforts to understand the social organization as against the political organization — of our free relationships in society vis a vis government, from whatever source derivident it wields its power.

     Society consists of men united by voluntary reci­procal relationships; government holds men under a bondage of coercion and force. Society is not merely a state of freedom; it is the practice of it. The more we practice freedom — voluntary relations — the more society — civilization — we achieve. This free process is contract, the only social positive, against coercion, which is the social negative. Society, resting upon exchange of vol­untary services, as distinguished from involuntary servi­tude, is historically recent. It rose upon, and its con­tinuity and growth still depend upon, expansion of the contractual process and its extension into widening fields of free and reciprocal association. Its ultimate is the full practice of freedom. Government, like society, is a relationship between men, but it is the contrary relation­ship; its ultimate is the full practice of slavery. Society cannot advance by the political nor by any other coercive process. Its method of freedom transcends coercion and thereby displaces it. Government, as coercion and restraint, with or without consent, is primordial. It is socially legitimate only in the restraint of violence.

     Governments, in guise of services, have always im­posed servitude by process of force; society, in its growth, has provided services by the free process of con­tract — based on ownership — through the Market — the only institution that transcends slavery. Witness ancient agriculture “socialized” to master states, imperial or democratic, and to local dark-age barons until a wide­spread free marketing of its products by the system of contract and exchange, transcending government, arose in that field. Witness the Eighteenth-Century “socialized” administration of community sites and resources, determining the possession and use of lands, by governments established under conquerors and kings, until development of the contract process took the distribution of sites and resources almost completely out from the arbitrary dominion of government and placed land under the non­-coercive jurisdiction of society, through the free process of the open market, as to its possession and use.

     “Socialization,” the current trend, through taxation, reverses this evolution. It returns agriculture, all productive industry to dictate of the war and slave power. War determines only the seat of the slave power; revolu­tions and elections change nothing essential, only its political personnel. This tax-based power imposes seizures and involuntary servitudes; it can only expropriate pro­prietors and install politicians and thus “socialize” not only wealth but the sources of wealth — the sites and resources of the land — for land must be conquered before its produce can be seized.

     When new knowledge of nature raises production a hundredfold — more produce from less land — not plenty but surplus and poverty ensue, for trade barriers rise, exchange is inhibited, the resulting idleness is subsi­dized and still less land is employed. War and inflation with their lure of dollar profits do for a time galvanize the stricken social powers until the inevitable reaction when the dollars are found to be only paper profits not redeemable in services or goods. Any approximation to full and regular production depends upon distribution not as distorted by government but by society under the free equities and balanced exchanges of the market, and this whether the distribution be of goods and services or of resources and lands.

     Ownership and conquest, both are modes of distribu­tion, but they are opposite modes; the one is social, the other political and, in the long term, lethal to society. The one flows through freedom as expressed in ownership with its social prerogative of contract, the other from conquest and taxation, from invasion of ownership by the political prerogative of force.

     Unlike government, society distributes production only by the free acts of its members in their execution of contracts, of measured exchanges one with another, by making sales, leases and loans, and each is recom­pensed for his service as distributor by the service (value) he receives in return. The effect of this interchange of distributive services, these reciprocal contracts, is the distribution of possession and use of or authority over physical and particular things. And it is not only to the possession and use of things that are produced from land and can be moved but to the possession and use of the land itself that the non-political social distribution must be applied. Here too there are two kinds of distribution, the one social and by free contracts, the other physical, by conquest and coercion. Proprietor­ship — possession by title, by the social authority and prerogative of contract — and ex-propriation — posses­sion by the physical authority of conquest or equivalent coercion — society versus slavery; — these are the two great opposites in the relations among men as to posses­sion and authority over land as over all needful and desired things. And proprietorship is creative, for it distributes possession and use among the most productive, by negotiation and without other discrimination, and for this service none but voluntary recompense is received. Political distribution is destructive, for it discriminates against the most productive and in favor of the least pro­ductive; it is not contractual, therefore coercive; it earns no recompense, therefore has no revenue but spoil.

     The greatness of Henry George was in his recognition that ground rent is the only social, non-violative, revenue in exchange for community public services. His error lay in his proposal to have the political — the tax-taking and war making power, seize this at present quite limited revenue out of the hands of those to whom society peaceably awards it in exchange for their contractual alloca­tion of sites and resources, — that most basic and essen­tial of all public services, without which services to society all the bounty of nature would fall under politi­cal and ultimately totalitarian control.

     It was Henry George’s misfortune that he proposed political measures to destroy property in land and thereby a reversion to political distribution and control. But even his most ardent followers, when taking any practical steps, have never attempted anything but the very contrary from what he proposed. Throughout five continents wherever they have established communities supposedly under his plan they have in every instance set up a corporate or similar landlord, a non-coercive public authority, to take title to and distribute the sites and receive ground rent in exchange for this basic public /service/ contractually performed. In their “single-tax” communities they have deliberately established the identical institution of public service that Henry George proposed to destroy. And these “single tax” landlords by taking only voluntary recompense for public services give the community inhabitants a measure of immunity from coercive levies, just as landlords in general perform the same distributive services and receive in recompense only such voluntary revenue as the open market freely awards.

     Sovereignty, state-ism, has always been the only source and support for tyranny and war, of all the great coercions and enslavements of men, whatever the manner or form, from tax-bonded “citizenship” through “welfare” bureaucracy to their full “security,” so called, under its cattle and at last its chattel slave form. Sovereignty, the state, is the converse of property as society is the converse of slavery, for without property there can be no contract, hence no freedom, no uncoerced relationships. The state does not support property either in goods or in lands. It only abrogates the social prerogative of property, freedom of contract, and by its prerogative of force leads to political property in men. Property rests on the democracy of common consent, the unconscious instinct in men to practice contractual in preference to coercive relationships, to trade instead of raid, to prac­tice contract through respecting property, to create civilization in preference to sovereignties, to evolve free societies in place of ancient slave states. Only in recent centuries has the property-based reciprocal or contract relation, as a system, come to prevail at all widely — among all men — and then mainly with respect to properties and things that can be individually and sep­arately enjoyed. Those properties and services that men cannot enjoy otherwise than public /publicly? check original/ or in common with one another remain under state domination and control.

     Common or public services cannot be delivered indivi­dually or separately to particular persons. They are appurtenances of the place where they are supplied and individuals can enjoy them only /by/ being in and occupying some part of the place to which they are supplied and to which they appertain. But the owners of such places, communities, have not as yet evolved into the necessary proprietary organization to provide their properties, and thereby their occupants and inhabitants (including themselves), with public protection and other common utilities. Without being organized they do unconsciously serve as distributors of the sites and thereby of all the actual services, less disservices, appurtenant to them. They dispense site advantages and community services as perquisites of their properties and, being owners, they do this by the social process of contract and consent, and their recompense, ground rent, is automatically measured, socially awarded and voluntarily paid to them. But apart from this social distribution all other community services still remain under authority and control of the ancient slave sovereignties through their modern successors duly elected or accepted and still widely worshipped even today.

     It is the noble task of modern society, only half born out of slavery, to truly social-ize the common or public properties and facilities out from the domination of the political war and slave power. This it can do by extension of its contractual system, through the free enterprise of enlightened community owners seeking their legitimate recompense and profit in return for public services — primarily protection from governmental or other violence — in that vast and almost virgin field.

     Society, civilization, today rests upon so much of free enterprise as in recent centuries has risen above the almost universal totalitarianism of the ancient world. Private services have been brought under its golden rule of reciprocal exchange but the political authority bears it down and in the public sphere the ancient ways remain unchanged. “The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force.” But when the process of contract is extended into the public field by consoli­dation of community ownership into a proprietary authority whose income will rise as it protects and serves and fall as it fails, then men will no longer have to suffer the sovereignties they love nor the slaveries and wars that they now deplore and civilization will be secure.

     Now my good and admirably energetic friend, I have invited your legal and logical mind far above the vain sophistries of liberty and security through any legis­lative or other coercive process into the high view of a continuing social evolution through the organization of property for service and profit in the public as well as in the now diminishing private domain. I hope you can vision its creative beauty and in its high contrast against the low communistic conceit of winning peace and freedom either by rude violence of revolution or war or by the gradual but no less deadly method of legislative expropriation that destroys the contractual, the only uncoerced relationship that nature exhibits among any large numbers of men.

     Let me close with a reference to the best of all my compliments to you: It is the one referred to by Emerson when he wrote, “Senates and sovereigns can confer no honors and compliments like the presenting of a worthy thought and presupposing its courteous and intelligent consideration.”

Very sincerely yours,

 

I enclose three pamphlets on Property in Land and Pro­prietary public administration; also my pocket folder of 1940, “Why the Henry George Idea does not Prevail,” which is still far in advance of all current conceptions; a schedule of some dozen discoveries in the field of Socionomy, the objective science of society; and also, for your further information on my activities, a copy of my 1947 listing in the International Who’s Who.