Spencer Heath Archive

Item 126

Pencil by Heath on notepad paper

No date

     Every sale is just as much a purchase as it is a sale. Only the point of view differs.

     The market does not produce, fabricate or organize anything but itself. For it is the association — organization — of men under the unique and exclusively human relationships of honest contract as opposed to those of coercion by force, deception or fraud. The market requires the general observance of ownership and titles in order that contract and exchange may be practiced, for contracts must have subject-matter, and only such objects as are owned by the parties can be the subject-matter of contract.

     The market establishes equivalence in exchange but no other equivalence. It requires that all its members have free and equal undisputed authority over their own persons and whatever else they own by clear title indisputably and by common consent. The processes of the market are founded on ownership, for unless the parties have undisputed ownership of their respective persons and possessions no free relations can be carried on, no contracts made or performed.

     Every contract, in its performance, is at the same time both a sale and a purchase; only the point of view differs. Each act of performance is an act of distribution, not of services or goods themselves but of their ownership or use, entire and unlimited if by sale, partial ownership and limited use if by rental or lease. Only this act of distribution is recompensed by the other party. The market in balancing equivalents takes no account of previous things done or suffered or expenses incurred. The recompense called price or rent is for the act of distribution alone. The contract of sale or lease does not obligate any past act or performance; only the present act of distribution and such future acts of performance, if any, as are set out in the contract. In any event, it is the crucial act of transfer and no other act that calls forth and commands recompense as the market-value of that act.

     Material or physical production is a changing relation not of conduct among men towards one another but between men and their physical and non-human environment. It is not dependent upon the free cooperation of contractually associated men; slaves also can produce physically. But it is enormously facilitated where there is free cooperation and division of labor among men who respect ownership and practice distribution of ownership by the market process of free contract and exchange.

     In the market, men recompense one another not for any past labors or pains nor for any future production as such, but only for their present acts of assignment of title to things already existing and owned or title to things promised in future to exist and be owned by the promisor.

     Thus although men constantly speak of labor and materials — things — as being exchanged, it is in reality only for the services of distribution of ownership by the assignment of titles, and in such assignments, that men find mutual recompense. This change of relationships among themselves — changes of behavior towards one another with respect to material things — and this above all else, is what gives modern civilized mankind such enormous power and dominion over his environment and the conditions under which he lives.

     This golden rule technology of free contract, in which no man practices coercion or dominion over any other, so far as this order has evolved above the chaos of coercions and wars by political organizations and powers, has endowed the human spirit with virtually unlimited creative power over the material world.

     Yet vast contrary organizations of men under “principalities and powers” still persist — upheld by the blind allegiance of men who confuse ends with means, who let their dreams of freedom and peace sanctify the promises of those who have no technology of peace through ownership and exchange but only such as can be based on taxation and war, regulation and rapine. But the failure is no default of governments. They understand their peculiar technology of coercion and seldom hesitate to extend it in all circumstances under whatever promises and pretexts have the most popular appeal. Default lies rather with the blind practitioners of freedom who carry on our entire economy by rule of thumb without even dreaming of its existence, much less trying to understand the wonderful rationale, the universal principles that obtain throughout all their makeshift empirical operations. The free economy is like a blind giant groping in darkness without chart or compass towards goals it knows not of nor even if any worthy goals there be.

     The national income stated in value units represents the sum of all contributions to the exchange system. So far as this system is concerned the national income could buy back for its recipients the market equivalent of all that they have contributed. But the contrary and coercive system, the political system, appropriates forcibly a large part of the national income for its own maintenance and expenditures without itself making or having made any contributions to the exchange system, hence without any voluntary income therefrom of its own. This it does by taxation, by the employment of self-issued false value units and by vast borrowings that it can never repay.

     This system is tolerated because, beyond the security of possession afforded by the practice of private property in land, in every place occupied as a community the exchange-practicing inhabitants have needs that their market economy has not been sufficiently developed and extended to supply. To occupy a community they have need of a common defense and protection of property and life (com-munium), a common system of communication and transportation, and many other facilities of living and for serving one another that appertain to and are inseparable from the place, the real property, occupied as a community.

     We owe our modern system of exchange administration to its free contractual technology of owning, selling and leasing taking over in recent centuries the administration of land and with it of agriculture and of most of the industries dependent on land or its products. This vast emancipation of modern mankind from the crude political systems of slavery and serfdom that were almost universal in the darkness of ancient and medieval times is the sole support, however precarious, of all that modern civilization has attained. What makes it precarious is that the free contractual system confines itself almost exclusively to the administration of those services and properties that supply food, clothing and shelter and similar services that can be enjoyed separately and not necessarily in common as public or community-wide services must be. This leaves these latter still in the hands of our modern “democratic” counterparts of the ancient totalitarian regimes. The modern emancipation is precarious not because of governments but because it is incomplete, because its technology of free contract, selling or leasing of properties by owners, has been but little extended into the growing field of public and common services and needs.

     Free enterprise has its defenders but no protagonists, and they are content with mere protest and vociferation against the encroachments that are always implicit in any kingly or other political power. Only by its evolution and advance into new fields displacing with order and solvency the chaos of their political administration. /Sentence? Check original/

     Almost until the 19th century the administration of land was carried on not by ownership and selling or leasing it but by conquest and subjugation of and political government over the inhabitants of them. The prerogatives of taxation and war were possessed by land holders alone. Then with the rise of free cities and the extension inland of seaborne trade and exchange and its riches, new political powers, such as merchant princes and guilds arose, servile populations were drawn into freer and richer fields of action and the political powers of landholding came to an end. Land from then on in the Western World has been under proprietary administration by the free contractual process of distribution by sale and by lease.

     And new sovereignties have taken over entirely the former land-holders’ tax-taking and war-making regulatory powers, under popular belief that public services can never be provided in any other way.

     Over any inhabited territory there are two kinds of jurisdiction, called by international lawyers, the imperium and the proprium. They are called also sovereignty and proprietorship or ownership.