Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2311

Typed letter by Heath from Grace Line Steamship Santa Clara off Barranquilla to E. Paul duPont, Montchanin, Wilmington, Delaware

April 11, 1947

 

Dear Mr. duPont:

     Please be good enough to forgive my seeming neglect of your letter of some weeks or months ago. Matters of business and especially the illness of one of my daughters in Virginia have preoccupied me to so great extent I have not felt I could write to you adequately or at length upon our matter of common interest.

     During my years’ connection with the movement to destroy private property in land that took its chief modern impetus from Henry George I felt frequently that there must be, as yet unknown, a positive and constructive side to this legislative and essentially destructive proposition. It did not, in effect, propose any abolishment of or relief from taxation but only a concentration of it. It did not propose the creation of any ground rent or land value but only the political (forcible) appropriation of it. George’s great contribution lay not in his proposal to do violence against property (and thereby all free contractual) relationships, but in his high-lighting of ground rent (land value) as the natural and appropriate voluntary revenue or recompense for public services.

     I have had the good fortune to discover for what vital, albeit unconscious, community services the owners of land are currently recompensed with ground rent. This introduces the positive side. For the knowledge of what public services are now being recompensed by ground rent shows how such recompense can be indefinitely created and increased when those to whom it peaceably accrues learn further to safeguard and serve the public interests in the place where their holdings lie. Through such enlightened self-interest public revenues can be raised in response to services instead of services (if any) coming in response to the taking of public revenue by force. Thus taxation can be diminished and eventually displaced by the creation of rent; just as wagons have been displaced by the creation of motor vehicles. Raiding is displaced by trading, just as any crude condition of general thievery (as among some primitives) is displaced by the creation of legitimate incomes, such as wages and profits, through the performance of services.

      This point of view, this positive side of Henry George’s “Philosophy of Freedom” needs only to be publicized — moderately and among persons of substance and capacity — to put increasingly into effect under the legitimate though unspectacular motivation of performing new and great services for the sake of the recompense and profits — the values — to be created thereby. Such procedure is as radical as it is legitimate, for it opens the way in which community services can be supported out of revenues created by them. Thus all public services can be conducted eventually without the chronic violence that we know as taxation and hence without political insecurity and recurrent wars.

      I am presenting the above point of view to you with the particular hope that you will at once neither embrace nor reject it but will give it your dispassionate examination from every angle that you command. During my considerable acquaintance with your brother, Francis I. duPont, I became much indebted to him for many business and personal favors and for his constructive criticism and other aids in my efforts to discover and understand. I am happy indeed at the possibility of a similarly pleasant and fortunate acquaintance with you.

                                 Sincerely,

 

 

 

I am scheduled to return to New York (11 Waverly Place) April 24^th but may be a few days delayed.