Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1799

Pencil notes

July 12, 1941

 

 

TO MR. KENDAL

 

     Ground rent is the recompense that the occupants of a community automatically give for the advantage of enjoying a peaceable and productive distribution and use of its sites and natural resources upon terms open and equal to all.

     They get these advantages from the persons whom they designate with much formality as proprietors to hold and distribute the sites and resources by a public consent that henceforth takes the place of private violence. This results in a distributive service being performed by contract and consent and for this service they give the voluntary recompense called ground rent. They pay this ground rent out of the wealth that this peaceable holding and distribution of land makes it possible for them to produce. They exchange part of this wealth in payment for these public or community services that enable them to produce it. The amount of ground rent thus paid is determined by the amount of their production and by their own wishes and desires as expressed in the free contracts which they respect and to which they consent.

    Ground rent is paid and received by contract and consent. Taxation is enforced by compulsion, confusion and deceit and not by exchange or consent.

     Ground rent is paid for a service that makes production possible and thus contributes to it.

     Taxation is a drain on production; furthermore, it supports restrictions on trade and exchange that restrain production and finally prevent it altogether.

     All taxation of the properties and processes of production and exchange inhibits the performance of services (employment) and production of wealth. It prevents the free distribution and exchange of wealth among its owners by contract and consent and distributes it by force, and thus prevents it from being produced.

     Taxation destroys ground rent by destroying the production of wealth, thus reducing both the need and demand for land and the fund of wealth or production out of which alone ground rent can be paid.

     Taxation not only seizes existing wealth out of the common markets but it is then used in ways that prevent new wealth from coming in. It thus prevents the employment and creates unemployment of land and its resources, of capital in all its forms and of men in all their capacities.

     Land cannot be in demand while production is in decline.

     Taxation is the fuel that feeds destruction and war. It makes government a parasite on society, finally destroying its host and thus terminating its own existence.

     No public service can be so needful as the abolition of taxation. The income to public proprietors depends wholly and utterly upon production, — for it is a part of production. As public proprietors they have no office or function but to give the kind of public services and protection to the territory they own and to its inhabitants that will insure the greatest freedom of production and the utmost productivity.

     In such public service and protection they will be the servants of all and they will be the greatest of all in their recompense — in their incomes, values, honors and rewards.