Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3204

Penciled drafting for letter to Kendal

No date

Original -> 1124

 

 

Dear Mr. Kendal:

Mr. Willcox excellently shows in his article /in/ Land and Liberty that land, including all the resources and transformations of nature, cannot be of any use or avail except by the process of labor, and it is only the process of labor than /sic/ can have any of the value that arises when men serve one another by the process of exchange.

     The processes of labor that men carry on in the preparation of the things of nature for exchange with other men is called production and the actual transfer of these things is called by the transferer sales and by the transferee purchases. All such labor processes, including those incident to exchange, are services because they are those kinds of labor and only those that command a recompense — and a recompense that is measured by the voluntary democracy of contract in an open market. All such labor as becomes services by its incorporation in materials of the earth for the purposes of exchange gives such materials the character of capital wealth, and it is only by the manipulation of this wealth that all consumers goods and services are brought forth. The only durable, permanent wealth and thereby considerable quantity of wealth in a society is the capital wealth — all the wealth that is not actually in process of being consumed and destroyed. And this capital is the only wealth of which economics as a science takes any account.

     Capital is of two kinds — public and private. All capital requires to be administered, that is, to be sold or to be so manipulated that the use and services of it can be sold. This brings a recompense (profit) for the administrative service, and this income is what gives it value as capital — capital value.

     Mr. Willcox knows that when materials are changed by labor for the use of others by sale and exchange, or to facilitate sales and exchanges, they cease to be land and become capital, or social-ized wealth, and that they remain capital so long as they are used either as objects or instruments of exchange. He knows, doubtless, also, that the instruments and facilities of exchange are of two great kinds or divisions, private and public — that there is private capital which, in terms of its use or itself, is administered and exchanged among private and particular individuals and that there is public  *  We cling to the thought that it is necessary and legitimate for the community servants to take their recompense by force (taxation) instead of by exchange. We feel that somehow the community itself and as such confers services and, as such, is entitled to recompense by force. This is the Roman and the Norman concept of the state. But the fact and reality is that the owners of the community and the community servants are such, not because they themselves are the community or represent it or render services to or for the community as such, but because they in common with each other render services to other occupants of the community which those occupants enjoy and partake of in common with one another. A community is a place of common occupancy and affording /?/ some, but not all, services in common. The owners and servants neither are nor do they represent the whole community or any part of it. They are a part of the population of it, and those who are served (directly) and pay rent (directly) are only another part of the population. (This is as true of the general community as it is of a hotel.) Those who receive none of the common services and pay neither rent nor suffer taxes are not in the community nor of its population.

     All of the community (place) values arise by practice of and because of the exchange relationship between the community (land) owners and those persons who partake of common services. There is no such relationship between the community (land) servants and any part of the population. Hence taxation; and the community values do not arise but are destroyed. If an exchange relationship were to be established by the landowners with the land servants by their employment, payment and supervision of them, then there would appear in community (land) values, and land users and no less than to land owners, all the values that taxation now inhibits and all that it now destroys, and all new values that could be born of and ______ by this new extension of the exchange relationship.

     Just as no private or consumers wealth can arise except by access to and labor upon the earth and its “_________”, so is it not possible for any private capital for the purpose of exchange to arise except under that security of ownership and possession of the private portions of a community that gives to the occupants the public portions and its capital and the necessary public facilities and freedom of exchange.