Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3195

Penciling in the same Stenographers Notebook as Item 193. This appears to be a large fragment of the original pencil draft of “Society and Its Services” (Item 2036). The phraseology is very close yet different, in some places simpler and better. I am not clear why this item was numbered 2841, a number already assigned. -Editor

No date

 

The original Stenographers Notebook is missing.

 

 

..the services of others and to transmit these services together with its own to its own clients and customers. It is not its business to administer the services that it must buy but only those that it has bought and must sell. There is no social process in serving oneself but only in serving others and being served by others in exchange. The abolition of taxes is a public service. It does not fall within the scope or domain of private business. Just as it is the business of the owners of a private community such as an office building or a hotel, with all its common services similar to those of a town, to administer all its properties in the interest of those who pay rent for its occupancy and use and for the many advantages, services and immunities thereby obtained and enjoyed, so is it the peculiar and exclusive business of the owners of the larger public communities not only to make a social distribution of their spaces and resources but to provide the private occupants and their businesses with every protection and service requisite to their security of property and the successful conduct of their affairs. When such immunities and services are obtained and performed for the occupants of the large communities that lie wholly out of doors, the owners will be recompensed in rising rents and values upon a scale proportionate to the productivity released and prosperity enjoyed. Every dollar of unnecessary taxation lifted will not only be restored to its producers but will release new production doubtless several dollars more, and the portion of this new exemption and production that will present itself in the market as new demand for land will greatly exceed all former rent and former taxes combined.

 

 There will be no destruction of values but only their creation. The new rent fund created by _______ the community servants will be more than ample to pay them and will be so employed. Government by depredation and destruction will be transformed into the administration of community property by community owners for the creation of community revenues and community income and values. None but the public properties will come under public or community control. Private property will be /secured/ and exempt and if the public owners become the greatest of all, it will be only as they become the servants of all.

     Henry George wrote the briefest and only perfect prescription ever penned for the emancipation of mankind — essentially only three words, “abolish all taxation.” He dreamed deeply of abundance, freedom and peace. But in his wrath at wreck and wrong, he dreamed a dragon in the way, and that mankind could be saved by an evil being destroyed instead of services being performed. And so to destroy what he dreamed as dragon, namely property in land, he urged a necessity to retain and employ to this end the same instrument of taxation the abolition of which his sound and practical prescription proposed. His fair philosophy of justice and freedom was dishonored by this crude and irrelevant doctrine of force instead of service that brought upon his constructive teachings the revulsion and neglect of almost all the world.

 

 The employment of rent instead of taxes to defray the cost of government, that it shall be honest and proper recompense for community services, is the very heart and essence of the Georgian ideal. When we discover that property in land is a community service, a social distributive or merchandising service, and that rents now arise because of and in response to this service we can see that the service precedes and is the cause of the recompense. This is the natural law of association in service — the same law that George expounds with respect to employed labor (service) always preceding and being the cause of the payment of wages. But the taxation that he would have employed to abolish taxation is the tool of tyranny, not a tool of service. It does not proceed from any service that precedes and causes it. All services are the product of services, and all true services create the values that recompense them. Social salvation must come through services and yet more services, to create values and yet more values, and not through taxation, the technique of tyranny, to destroy them. Henry George was not unmindful of the services of landowners and he /approved/ their receiving recompense for their services. But when he proposed so enormous a public service as the abolishment of taxes, he did not propose that there be any recompense for this great service and he failed to observe that only land owners and no others could be recompensed for it and therefore that they alone were in position to perform it. He suggested that millionaires might make free gifts and provide free services to cities and that this would raise rents but it did not occur to him that if the owners of the cities should provide further great services, such as the abolition or even the mitigation of taxation, the further new rents and great values that would accrue would be their natural and proper recompense for such services. He did not perceive that his proposition in what he called its “practical form” would be self-enacting, self-executing and, best of all, self-liquidating. Lacking this clear insight, he urged a compulsive technique of taxation and not a truly educational technique of enlightenment — taking the kingdom of heaven by force.

 

 Henry George, the dreamer, the mystic, the poet, herald of the social dawn, visioning beauty and beneficence, he warmed the hearts and raised the hopes of men; and he put his “proposition into practical form” but he gave it moralistic and destructive implications that obscured its transcendent virtues and set against it “the classes most to be benefited by it” and the sober opinions of the world. He endeavored to establish general principles but he charged us to make further application of them than he had done. When we have fulfilled his trust, when we have revealed this beneficent splendor, then we will merit and we will have the world’s acceptance and acclaim.

 

______________________________

 

Dear Mr. duPont:

 

Reference is to your letter of the 8^th. I surely do know as well as you do that tenants cannot be found for every piece of land. Such idle land yields no rent at present (if ever). Nothing is being given today, either outright, as a price, or for its limited use, as rent. If such a day comes, then what is received for it will be its value, then but not until then. Meanwhile it produces nothing, neither price nor rent, and there is nothing that can be capitalized or otherwise taken as present value. If it is ”now held for a price” that does not give it any value unless or until the price (or rent) is actually received.

 

 What the owner has is not a value, but merely a hope (a hope that he will be recompensed, ultimately, for the stand-by services of himself and predecessors). What he hopes for but has not may be called a prospective value, but not a real value unless or until it becomes realized. The real value of any property or service depends upon and is expressed by the recompense actually received for it — not an imaginary recompense. Real value depends upon receiving real income, whether annually as rent or capitalized in price. Present values are dependent on present income; and prospective values are nothing but prospective income. Values cannot be actualized in fantasy, but only in goods and services. The object of all owners should be to increase their present values and realize their prospective ones. This can only be done by supplying better and further services to present and prospective customers — tenants or producers. This is how all values are made, including the values of real estate.

 

 My pamphlets are a prescription of more services to create more values, and these services are specifically described. This is my fundamental premise. Is it sound? Is there any other or more practical way to raise and restore the income and value of any property?

 

 I feel very strongly that the matters I am presenting with reference to a most important topic deserve more thoughtful consideration and should receive more thorough examination than you seem to have given them. I would like very much to hear further from you.

 

 With very pleasant recollections and high regard, I am,

 

Sincerely yours,

 

S.H.

________________________________

 

 

37/   Dear Mr. C:

 

Society is the association of men performing and exchanging services for each other. A society can exist only in a community—a place where its members have something in common, namely, (1) portions of the place set apart for their common use upon good terms and conditions, and (2) the private or proprietary portions held in separate and exclusive possession. If these private portions are owned, if they have acknowledged proprietors, then and then only their use and possession can be held or distributed socially and democratically by contract and consent of the market by a merchandising process and therefore to all upon equal terms. Any alternative to this democratic possession by contract and consent would be possession by force, private or public, under either anarchy or despotism, barbarism or slavery. The society therefore creates and maintains itself, its very life from its inception, by establishing and recognizing proprietors to perform the vital service of making a social and democratic instead of an arbitrary and compulsive distribution among its members of all its sites and resources for which there exists any rivalry or economic demand. The recompense for which the society spontaneously awards, by all its members’ consent, to its proprietary officers in return for this vital service of distribution is called ground rent. Because this distributive service is performed by proprietors (however unknowingly) it is possible for land users to produce and exchange wealth and services with each other and out of this to recompense the proprietors for their distributive services. Accordingly, where production is high rent is high, where it is low rent is low and where there is no production — no use of land — there is no rent. This is why an idle site or resource yields no rent and has no present, if indeed any, value.

 

 This service of social distribution by ownership and proprietary administration is not any cause for land lying out of use; it is the only means whereby it can be peaceably apportioned, securely possessed, and, therefore, come into productive use. What causes land and resources to be idle /are/ the “schemes of taxation which drain the wages of labor and the earnings of capital as the vampire is said to suck the life blood of its victim,” and thus limit and prevent its profitable or productive use. Land ownership protects the land user against the arbitrary allocation of land by political authority and thereby prevents the monopolization of all desirable sites and resources by political privileges. Land ownership keeps an open market for land and thus prevents its monopolization, but although the owners of community lands have lately been purged of all their historic political and despotic power they have not yet extended to their tenants and purchasers any protection against the political appropriation by taxation of their wealth and capital values. This fast advancing blight on the employment of capital destroys the economic demand for land and its resources and sets all its values into decline.

 

 When, through the best teachings of Henry George and his followers or otherwise the land interests become sufficiently enlightened they will extend their present purely distributive service to the protection of their communities against the ravages of political government and eventually put in practice that noble prescription of Henry George, “To abolish all taxation save that on land value.” To carry out this program will be seen as their peculiar office and function; for the land-owning interest, as such, have no other business wherewith to concern or profit themselves but the interest and welfare of  the communities that they serve and upon the productivity and _________ upon which they depend for every increase of their present or prospective income and values. Every land-using business, of whatever kind, has its own private capital and its special clients, customers or patrons to serve. It is in business to receive and employ

 

                                           /Breaks off/