Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2971

Newspaper clipping from column “Down to Earth” by Los Angeles Times Real Estate Editor Al Johns, Los Angeles Times Real Estate Section J,

Sunday, March 12, 1961

 

 

 

 

Values for Young and Old

 

Spencer Heath is 85 years young. A resident lec­turer now living at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, his sparkling wit and keen powers of analysis are joys to behold.

 

The inventor of reverse pitch for airplane propel­lers, patents of which he sold to Bendix Aviation Corp. over 30 years ago, Heath, an engineer and lawyer, began philosophizing about real estate. Some of his concepts are in a book he wrote entitled “Cita­del, Market and Altar,” hailed by many leading thinkers as “a book of first importance.”

 

This work has excited comment and stimulated thought throughout Europe and America, for the ideas are brilliant, though it is not easy reading.

 

The author is concerned with the concept that free enterprise is not developing to its potential. He fears that it is losing ground to “creeping socialism,” the latter aspect completely intolerable to him be­cause “it checks the freedom of men’s minds and actions,” as he says.

 

Mr. Heath became a reader of this column some months ago and invited me to meet him. I have done so three times. In developing his thesis, he said to me: “Freedom is greatest of all in the market place. Here activity functions with the consent of all and the coercion of none.”

 

 It is his belief that the American way of life will flower into ever-expanding greatness when communi­ties operate like hotels. He also believes that home builders will profit more when they operate their developments on a lease basis, the property man­agement theory, and that newlyweds would benefit from even leasing their furnishings, automobile and everything except perishable items.

 

They would thus be able to live on fixed incomes with fixed savings. To him this is basic. Because without building savings through regular habits of thrift, they, in his opinion, can never achieve their full potential in acquiring capital to produce goods in their given fields of endeavor.

 

Mr. Heath will present his views in six seminars at Chapman College in Orange beginning Thursday. The series is entitled “Economics and the Spiritual Life of Free Men.” Home builders, land developers and realtors could learn much from this man.