Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1594

Carbon of a letter From Heath to Paul Poirot, The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

December 19, 1956

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Poirot:

     It was very nice seeing you at Irvington a week or so ago. It was pleasant to enjoy the intellectual and other hospitality of the Foundation.

     I was especially pleased at having received from you by the hand of Dr. Harper the article entitled, “The Single Tax: Its Economic and Moral Principles,” by Murray H. Rothbard.

     For a number of years, I have been looking forward to professional economists going into the question of social versus political ownership and administration of sites and other natural resources — God’s gifts to men. I look forward to Dr. Rothbard’s study arousing interest and provoking discussion of Proprietary Admin­istration as the creative alternative to the Number One Plank in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and other proposals for land “socialization,” or to the same effect. It is only too true, as Dr. Rothbard says, that “Econo­mists have never satisfactorily refuted them.” They have even acceded to the Communist argument so far as land is concerned, while currently they stand mute and let the anti-Communist case go by default.

     It is gratifying, therefore, to find in Dr. Rothbard a writer of professional standing who is looking into the matter, who has, in fact, discovered the societal function of non-political property in land: that site owners do in fact perform that basic and most essential of all public services — namely, the automatic, non-political allocation of sites and resources to the use of those who can administer them most productively and who alone can pay the highest rent or price.

     Recognition of this undeniable public service per­formed by landlords — and that rent is their market recompense for these public services — sets the social institution of property in land in an entirely new light. It cuts the ground alike from under the supposed Ricardian and Malthusian laws and the supposed moral and reli­gious argument in favor of bureaucratic or governmental in place of proprietary and social, that is, contractual, administration.

     Not only this, but it gives clue to the possibility of other authentic services to the sites, other than the mere distribution of them, such as the policing of the sites without molesting the property or otherwise infringing the liberty of the users or inhabitants of them — as policing by political authority necessarily does. Each free-holder would pay for police protection and other public services only in proportion as they affected the value of the site occupied by him, the quan­tum of payment being determined by the competition of the market, as is any other value.

     The principle of proprietary instead of political administration of public as well as private community properties and services (such as hotels, professional buildings, shopping centers, etc.) may quite possibly be the key to new advances in the economic and social sciences comparable to those made by physical science since the present century began.

     I hope to see Dr. Rothbard’s new venture receive at the hands of his professional associates all the attention and discussion that its great importance deserves.

Sincerely yours,

SH/m