Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1771

Penned notes for a letter to Royal D. Rood, with a pencil notation by Spencer MacCallum that a different version was sent in June 1954.

Dear Mr. Rood:

     I surely do owe you profound apology for my neglect and seeming disregard of your two or more letters. I wanted to write you at length in December but on a holiday visit to Virginia I was victim of an attack of the prevailing “flu” and quite a siege of slow recovery — and I did want to reply to your letters myself.

    I am much impressed with the energetic spirit of your organization and the sound thinking of yourself and your associates. There is only one kind of freedom that is actual and practical and productive of finer and thereby longer living. That is the freedom to serve and to be served — to sell and to buy. That is the prime distinction between the primitive barbarians and the long-living socially-organized man. The one does almost everything for himself alone, the other does almost everything for others. Each primitive can do but few things for himself and these few crudely and wastefully. Each civilized man does fewer or only a single kind of thing, but with the aid of property and organization he does it with vast facility and efficiency, and he does it for many whom he will never see and who in turn do the like with many kinds of other things for him. This is division of labor, trade and exchange. This is what unites men in freedom and peace and length of days. This we should cherish, even worship, and surely would if we but understood its vast beneficence.

    Yet no political organization, no government, can live except by tax-depredation and other violence against men and upon the properties that each, in free enterprise, devotes to meet the needs and wishes of many or all. Governments can restrain and imprison men and consume, waste or destroy property. They cannot build one great house except they tear many lesser houses down. Edmund Burke, the great English Conservative, in his Vindication of Natural Society devotes sixty pages to the awful destruction of life and property and of human character that every kind of government, especially people’s or popular governments, in all ages have wrought, and he concludes:

“The several species of government vie with each other in the absurdity of their constitutions, and the oppression which they make their subjects endure. Take them under what form you please, they are in effect but a despotism, and they fall, both in effect and in appearance too, after a very short period into that crude and detestable species of tyranny. For the free governments, for the point of their space, and the moment of their duration, have felt more confusion and committed more flagrant acts of tyranny, than the most perfect despotic governments which we have ever known.”

     Yet men always persist in setting up governments, even when they fear them, as our forefathers did. They grant them coercive powers and bind them with paper ribands not to usurp further powers. And there is a reason or, rather, a necessity for all this.

     Since the days of Saxon Alfred, men have not known or remembered any way to have necessary community services except at the hands of men on horseback or of men duly constituted or elected to succeed them in their power to seize and rule. In their slavish dependence on political sovereignties, proprietary administration, with its voluntary revenue has all but faded from the minds of men. Community owners, land-lords, providing the in-common services, needs and protection of free men without seizing their properties or otherwise coercing them, have come to be thought of as the same or similar to robber barons ruling servile bondmen chained to their estates.

     People in any community, slave or free, must have a common protection against unauthorized taxation or other unauthorized violence. To obtain this protection they authorize and legitimize the political violence of taxation and wars, vainly hoping that this political violence will not, soon or late, destroy those whom it was thought to protect. Further, they have no knowledge or belief that any other public or community services are or can be had unless from the hands of political persons direct or through public service corporations established by and subservient to them.

     It is little realized that nature has provided a beneficent alternative to all this, that Anglo-Saxon freedom, all Saxon public or community institutions were proprietary, based on the ownership of land and its revenue, and not on tax-depredation, as all political institutions, ancient and modern, have been and are. The Norman Conquest taught all Englishmen and their successors that none but the war-making and tax-taking powers could enforce peace or in any other respect administer public or community property and affairs. Even landowners themselves do not realize that their prime function is a distributive one, that the ground values they receive (rents) is their recompense for making contractual and thereby impartial and social distribution of nature’s opportunities and gifts, thus at once maintaining peace and freedom and keeping the allocation of occupancies out of the hands of political persons. Thus proprietary administration is the grand alternative to political and thereby coercive administration. So far as the occupancy of sites and resources is determined by contracts with owners and thus free from political administration, thus far and no further is it possible for people to have security of occupancy or possession of anything else.¹⁷⁷¹