Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1704

Tape recording of a 10-minute radio program on Station KWIZ, Santa Ana, California, featuring a discussion between Dr. George C. S. Benson, president, Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California, and Spencer Heath, president, The Science of Society Foundation, Inc.

March 28, 1960, 8:15pm

 

 

 

HEATH    I was very happy to hear that speech of yours on free enterprise giving something of the history of our country in that relationship.

 

BENSON   The main point I was trying to make was that economic liberty, or free enterprise, is very necessary to political liberty. A lot of people think that they can have the Government doing more and more things, and yet keep the pleasant system of ordered liberty which we now enjoy in the United States. I have the feeling, however, that if they have the government entering into more and more phases and controls of economic life, that political liberty is likely to disappear. I suspect liberty is kind of an indivisible thing. What do you think about that point?

 

HEATH    I think you are entirely right about that, and that perhaps a tragedy of our time is that we put so much belief in the iron-rule administration characteristic of all political governments.

 

BENSON   The problem is one that’s of course /of/ very real importance for our own society today, because many of the people who advocate some degree of collective action are good friends of ours who really don’t want to lose political liberty at all, and if they realized they were endangering political liberty, would be much less likely to advocate the actions they do for governmental interference with the economy. Now I’m perfectly willing to grant there are some things which the government has to enter into, but I think those things should be kept pretty limited. I believe you have some points of view as to ways in which the economy could furnish a number of services without governmental interference.

 

HEATH    Yes. I think that we have in our free-enterprise system the potentiality of not only developing it as we know it now, but of extending its operations into newer and wider fields. I feel that it is a spiritual power — that it works on the golden-rule plan as all honest business does — and, that if we learn to understand it better and better, that we will extend it more widely and more widely until it will undertake our common services which are now relegated so largely to government. So that instead of having the coercive arm of our society getting more and more of our power, and losing more and more of our freedom thereby, we will have our free economy reaching out further and further and taking over fields now occupied by the government economy. I believe that’s entirely possible. I believe it is inherent in our free-enterprise system.

 

BENSON   I’d like to hear a little more from you, Mr. Heath, about what you called the spiritual values of the free-enterprise system. I take it you mean by that the opportunities for the individual to develop himself and his own ideas and his own moral values, and the fact that he can do these more freely in a free economy. Is that what you were referring to?

 

HEATH    Yes, Dr. Benson, that is really the objective ideal. But when it comes to the means, we will discover, more and more, that we have to practice the golden rule rather than the iron rule. And if we practice the ordinary ethics of free enterprise, and extend its money-making capacities until we can make money — even fortunes, and vast fortunes — out of the administration of community services, corresponding to the fortunes that have been made out of the administration of private services, then we’ll be on the positive road towards realizing the dreams of our civilization.

 

BENSON   The making of community services as a matter of individual enterprise is an interesting point, and I’m sure one with which not all of our listeners will be familiar. So in a moment I’m going to ask you to expand on that. But I take it that the point you have in mind — as I understand it — is that many of the services which are now furnished by government could be better furnished to individuals by private enterprise of a non-compulsory nature, and that corporations could be set up which furnished such services as — I think you would go as far as much police work, and construction of roads, and transportation — and even schooling too? Are these all part of the community service which you believe would be better handled through corporate or individual enterprise?

 

HEATH    Yes. We must remind ourselves that individual free enterprise is recessive now. Our enterprise is becoming more and more corporate. We are doing things on a larger and more inclusive scale. And when it comes to communities — we have communities like hotel communities, and like shopping centers, which are organized as corporations, owned and administered by them under the golden rule by which men make money. And those things are creative. There are just two kinds of administration, you know. There is the administration by the process of contract, which creates values, and creates all of the things that we have, both material and spiritual values in our civilization. There is the other rule, sometimes called the iron rule, by which things are operated coercively and without the rationality of free contract. Now in order that we may carry the private type of enterprise into the public field, the communities must be organized on a larger scale, just as all properties are organized in the large corporation, and then that large organization gives these services over a wide-spread clientele. So in a community. The hotel is a sort of pilot plant, the shopping center is a sort of pilot plant, showing us how it is possible for us to so organize our properties and our administration of them that we can give services in a positive way — not in a negative way, alone, like protection. So in these communities we are giving police and many kinds of services — transportation and parks and drainage and all that sort of thing — as hotels do. And that is something we can expand. It can grow. It can grow upon what it feeds on; it can grow upon the profits which it creates. The spiritual aspect of it is this: there are two relationships between men. In one they are able to create; in the other they are able to destroy. One is in freedom, and the other is under government. As Edmund Burke so poignantly pointed out in his wonderful little book called The Vindication of Natural Society, governments have been responsible for nearly all the tragedies and all the destruction in the world. The condition of freedom, the contract relationship, practiced in our corporate forms, gives us wider and wider-spread community services. That’s where our hope lies.

 

BENSON   Would you feel that even the work done, say, by the federal government, for example the work that is done in defense activities and some of the economic activities of the federal government, could also be handled through this type of community-service, private corporation, which I take it is basically the thing of which you speaking?

 

HEATH    Yes. Eventually, yes. But, meantime, all our military defense and everything of that kind depends upon our economy. It’s only by advancing our economy that we can advance that which depends upon it. To promulgate these ideas, I have formed a modest, free-enterprise corporation, called the Science of Society Foundation, and it is on behalf of the society that I am speaking now.

 

BENSON   Have you published any statements of this position of yours, Mr. Heath? This is quite interesting to political economists, many of whom have, I think, not encountered exactly this point of view of yours.

 

HEATH    Yes, the basic principle of it has been filed in the New York City Public Library some 15 years or more ago, and of course the Library of Congress has a great deal of material of the same character. It had been drawn from history, and from the sciences, and pointing out the basic principle of organization by which people under the contractual type, or golden-rule type, of organization, can become spiritual through becoming more and more creative. Spirituality, of course, is the hall-mark of divinity in every religion. So when men become creative, they are spiritual. So we need to learn that the resources of mankind rest in his spiritual nature; and his spiritual nature is the nature that rests upon his freedom.

 

BENSON   There certainly can be no doubt about that, and the real problem in my mind when I see proposals for collectivizing the economy is how the collectivizers expect men to continue to be free and to develop themselves under their own incentives. But you didn’t quite answer a part of my question, Mr. Heath. Whereabouts are your ideas published? What’s the name of the book, and how can it be found?

 

HEATH    There are various pamphlets and the like that are supplied by the Science of Society Foundation, 1502 Montgomery Road, Elkridge, Maryland, the most significant one of which is a volume entitled, Citadel. Market and Altar, which was published by this Foundation some two years ago and is available from booksellers generally, although it has not had any very wide circulation except among selected circles.

 

BENSON   I have read the book myself, and know how interesting it is, and that’s why I wanted to be sure that you brought it out so that interested readers could follow it up. It’s a very interesting, thoughtful effort to see if these problems — which do involve common action — could not be met by a non-compulsory instrument. We have thought in recent years that we had to solve almost all of our problems through the compulsory instrument of government. But you have proposed a way in which this could be done through collective endeavor on an individual or corporate commercial basis, and this would certainly be very happy for many of us if this could be put into effect. Of course there are more than hotels /that/ follow this principle. We in colleges, for example, do it. We furnish a lease and other protection for our student body, and a whole variety of activities, and we don’t seem to have any very overwhelming problems in connection with this; and really we could be a whole complete community, a group of colleges like the Associated Colleges at Claremont, with relatively little trouble. In fact I think there might even be less trouble if we were a community /laughing/ rather than a part of a public body which tells us what to do and what not to do. There would be problems to work out, however; there would be times when some one corporation would be adopting a policy antithetical to other corporations, and men would have to exercise their ingenuity to some extent. But I think they could do that quite well. We have only a short time left in this broadcast; do you have anything else you would like to say about this?

 

HEATH    Well Dr. Benson, I’m very happy to have had this opportunity of letting the world know that I pioneered in several different things — in the automobile field and in the airplane field — and I’ve never pioneered in anything so beautiful and so wonderful and so potential for the welfare of mankind as this new view of the potentialities of our free-enterprise system.

 

BENSON   That is an inspiring note on which to end.

 

HEATH    And if we had more educational institutions following in the pattern of the Claremont Men’s College, I am sure our future would be very, very bright.