Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3156

Typed page by Heath relating to the McGlynn Doctrinal Statement

No date

 

 

 

The big purpose above all else of this and similar essays is to arouse to the conscious intelligence of men that there exist in the world just two kinds of authority, that which men have over their fellow men and is called political and is exercised by coercing them, and that authority which men have over themselves and their right­ful possessions, as against the encroachments of other men, and is exercised by making and performing contracts with them whereby each serves many and is by many served in turn.

 

    In the political relationship the authority is unequal —coercion on the one side and submission on the other. In the proprietary or contractual relationship, the autho­rity is equal; all parties have equal authority over their persons and their possessions. No other equality is necessary or in the least to be desired.

 

In juridical language, where the two authorities are territorial, the one is called the proprium, the other the imperium. The one is the right of property and contract; the other is the right of ex-propriation and coercion. This essay has been prepared to point up the social nature of the proprium specifically as it operates contractually and most blessedly through the social institution of private property in land.

 

To draw serious attention to this, it has seemed necessary first to expose the fallacy — the fantasy — of the “unearned increment” so long and so widely believed. Thus the critique of Dr. McGlynn^!s Doctrinal Statement is only incidental to the main purpose. In like manner, the exposure of land communism as the neces­sary totalitarian aim gives timeliness to a subject of discussion no less vitally important to civilization for its having been almost universally misconceived or ignored.

 

It would be unwarranted and vain to expose the inherent fallacies of long slanting false conceptions unless there be sunlight at hand for windows that have long been closed.

 

What is of central importance to mankind is to understand the autonomous contractual processes whereby the very foundation of freedom is established and main­tained and whereby alone Society evolves and free man must at last become supreme.