Spencer Heath Archive

Item 137

Carbon by Heath of an early essay on land, community and rent.

July 29, 1939, revised August 24

MAN, LAND AND COMMUNITY

     Man can live only on land, but as a civilized population he can live only on land that is made safe and suitable for the peaceable relationships of ownership and exchange of services. The land must have land lords and land servants — proprietary (private) owners and political (public) servants. Thus only does it become a community having services and facilities for the common use of its inhabitants. In virtue of their ownership and in the degree that it is not impaired or completely cancelled by taxation, land owners have security of possession and access to these common services. When they extend any portion of this security to others, they do so by rendering a service to them — a sales or exchange service. The recompense of land owners for this sales service is called rent. The selling and buying of possession is the peaceable and pro-social distribution of the community resources and advantages.

     The land servants — political and public servants — however, do not give any services to others by way of sales or exchange. Their services are performed by way of taxation and distributed by political privilege and special legislation. Their recompense is seized recompense and not a voluntary one determined and measured by exchange.

     Rent is voluntary and legitimate, the measure of a service by exchange and hence of a value. Taxation is arbitrary and compulsive. It measures no service, evidences no exchange and therefore creates no value. When land lords, in the exercise of their lordship — of their ownership — take any action or use any portion of rent to mitigate or abolish any taxation, they create community values. They use rent to transform taxes into rent, to raise the meager proceeds of compulsion into abundant recompense for service. For to mitigate taxation is a public service for which there is a desperate need, and rent is a voluntary public recompense for every public service that security of possession confers.

     When community servants, land servants, in their exercise of compulsion “appropriate rent by taxation” — use taxation, which is compulsive, to destroy rent, which is voluntary — they convert rent into taxes — that given because of services into that given because of compulsions.

     Exchange is the economic, the pro-social process. The function of ownership is to exchange. All social values (created socially) are exchange values.

     To consume and thereby destroy is an individual function. To exchange and thereby create is a social function and attribute. All things that are exchanged and all things that contribute to exchange are capital, for they are social-ized wealth engaged in the social process of creating social values by voluntary exchange. Exchange is an attribute of ownership; only so far as things or services can be owned can they be exchanged or have any exchange value. Ownership, therefore, is the only means of social service — the primary requisite to any social services being performed — for none can exchange anything except he own it, and then only so far as his ownership is uninfringed by taxation.

     So far as security of possession in land, with its incidence of community services, can be owned, then to that extent it can be exchanged. When security of possession in oneself and one’s services and products can be owned, then these can be exchanged. In either case the exchange is effected by a sales or merchandising process, performance of which is itself a part, the final and critical part, of the services being exchanged. When private property and services are transferred by this sales process in exchange for secure possession of land and the public services incident thereto, the private value thus given by one and received by the other is called rent, and the public value thus given and received is called land value.

     The full and proper function of land lords is to provide land services, i.e. community services and capital, and to merchandise these services to land users in exchange for rent. It is the full and proper function of land servants — community political servants — to merchandize to land owners their services (labor), and also the services of their capital, in exchange for salaries and wages for their services and in exchange for either purchase price or interest, on any public capital (community capital) they supply.

     It is the full, proper and complete function, and the highly profitable function, of land lords collectively through land ownership and land administration not only to hire all the labor and services of every degree, and to procure by purchase or borrowing all the capital that can be advantageously employed for common and public uses in the community, but also adequately to supervise that hired labor and efficiently administer all that purchased or borrowed capital used in connection with the public reservations of ways and other lands of common use, and to do these public things in the interest and to the highest service of all those who occupy and use and pay rent for the privately and separately possessed lands of the community.

     Such highly and socially developed community services, administered by an organized land-owning interest without the incubus of taxation to penalize production, inhibit exchanges, and thereby impair and finally destroy all values and all ownership, is capable of so ameliorating the distresses and increasing the productivity of the population that the values of a territory so served would become unimaginably high. As the productivity of the economic life arose, so would rise the quality and abundance of the public services incident to the possession and use of land. And the free interaction by exchange between the system of publicly administered services and the system of private services and values must establish such abundance of subsistence and so transform the material conditions of human life, that it can rise to its utmost and undreamed perfection in beauty and length of days.