Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2769

Pencil draft on notepad for letter to John S. Codman, marked “unfinished.”

February 1946

 

 

 

Please let me first apologize for my ungracious failure to keep up correspondence with you. This being done, I wish to acknowledge and thank you for sending me lately a copy of your “Tax Reduction” plan for the Boston area. You and Mr. Condale /?/ are to be congratulated on this. I think it is just about the most direct and persuasive statement of the Henry George point of view and consequent proposals I have examined to date. Please send me two more copies. I enclose stamps to cover.

 

 I have long held you to be one of the first who are both able and eager, or at least willing, to distinguish between propaganda and enlightenment. The one appeals to feeling and demands the action that it suggests or preaches. The other appeals to intelligence, stimulates not contagious feeling but independent thought. It rests on examination, leads to discovery and understanding and making greater use of that which is found to serve and exists; not the reform or abolition of it.

 

 The propagandist for  action is neither willing nor able to examine his premises. He is chained to them. He can tolerate only the one point of view that urges the particular action he urges and seeks to impose. He insists that his is the only point of view; that no other can exist and in his own self-delusion he has no conscience but to delude as many others as he can.

 

 My counting you among those who rely on intellect above emotion, science above superstition, gives me hope that I may, without offence, question the basic premises and general point of view on which your proposal of action is based.

 

 At the outset I am struck by the incongruity between your ends and means. Your prize-winning paper is entitled, A Tax Reduction Plan for Metropolitan Boston,” yet I find on no one of its 31 pages any suggestion or even mention of any reduction of the existing tax levy. On the contrary it is urged on page 22 that the total tax levy could be raised from 62 millions to 67 millions, even at present rates and assessments, by collecting the entire levy upon the owners of occupied and unoccupied locations alike, according as they are now valued and assessed.

And to this is  added the suggestion that with building owners now exempt the “use value of locations” and thus the assessments against their owners, could be greatly increased. In all this there is only a proposal to transfer taxation and increase the tax levy.

 

 There is evidence that its authors are not wholly insensible to this contradiction. Throughout the paper there is a marked and studious /?/ avoidance of the word “tax” in connection with any existing or proposed levy against the owners of land. They are referred throughout as “title holders,” as though they alone held titles to real or other property, and they are charged with being the exclusive recipients of “location values,” both actual and hypothetical, whether they enjoy any rent or not or even suffer a net annual loss. The point of view is that since a landowner never contributes any services, his revenue, if any, is not properly his own; /so/ then the taking it away from him is not properly a tax but a restitution. (And if he has no income from it, he must still be under a forced levy to the amount his income would be (?) if he had any.) Despite Webster’s definition, you prefer not to call the “forced contribution” a tax. This seizure of land rent, and of other property from the land owner if there is no rent, you call not taxation but payment for public services or “location value.” By denying that a building can have public services or “location value” and imputing this only to land, the seizure of an owner’s property by taxation ceases to be a tax by the mere psychological device of attributing the seizure no longer to his ownership of improvements. Thus a mere transfer not of the tax but of the grounds and occasion or “incidence” or basis of its computation is supposed to transform the seizure from a tax into a payment for public services or “location value.” Seizure is still seizure, however rationalized or sought to be justified, yet this mere wordplay, honestly believe in, seems to be your only conscience for giving to your proposal to alter the incidence of the present and even greater tax burdens by the deceptive title of a “Tax Reduction Plan.” Forced contribution is still forced contribution, however rationalized and by whatever name called. Infringement of property is infringement of freedom. The only power to do this is the sovereign, the political power — the only power that levies taxes and thereby levies war, the power to rule and thereby enslave, whether by conquest or by request — by “consent of the governed.” This sovereign power does not practice equal exchange and therefore does not create any values either public or private. It does not serve the public but, once and however established, it compels the public to serve it. It does not create any wealth except, as in prisons, by the forced contributions of its willing or unwilling citizens and subjects or slaves. And it is always in active or potential rivalry with every other sovereign power, either fomenting, waging or at best defending against and thus engaging in war.

 

 Sovereignty is not ownership. It practices and depends on the seizure of property and abrogation of ownership. Having no property of its own it can meet no obligation of its own. Its obligations can only be fulfilled by compulsion or the submission of those whom it professes to serve. It is their properties, their services, their persons and liberties over which it rules, and that it overrules.

 

 Apart from the animal and primitive amenities within families or tribes or among other small numbers having common blood or descent, the only relationship that unites large numbers of men in harmony and peace is the world-wide system of contract and exchange. This is the universal society in which men are interrelated not by dominance and submission but by contract and consent. And this depends on ownership and property for every contract must have subject matter; for only in the /degree/ that men are free to administer and dispose of their services and properties can they have any contractual or exchange relations one with another. In all living and non-living things there are but two basic relationships: that in which they are mutually and can be increasingly drawn together and that which sets them increasingly apart. Among men they are Society, based on contract and property, and Sovereignty, based on coercion and abrogation of property. The one is a carry-over from the unregenerate man before his rebirth into the contractual and thereby social relationship. Its law is of the jungle, the conquests of sovereignty over sovereigns with slave pens /?/ ever in the train. Whether by conquest or through alliances and confederation the weaker sovereignties constantly go down until again there remains but a single power — a new apotheosis of the jungle law.

 

 I make these allusions to the essential character of political sovereignty merely to make clear what kind of power you invoke when you propose to abolish free trade in land by destroying the impartial jurisdiction of the market and confiding the allocation of sites and resources to political control. They would most certainly be monopolized in the hands of governmental privilegees. For the higher law of freedom and service by  exchange we must look not to the anachronistic state but to that only other general organization of mankind, the social system of voluntary contract and exchange. We need to discover our autonomous social organization, its mode of functioning and its higher potencies and powers

 

/Breaks off here/