Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1072

A letter originally written to Heath’s aunt, Minnie Payne Barr, according to a note in Politics versus Proprietorship, where this is reproduced in a form partly edited by someone other than Heath

August 1933

To the Editor of The Sun:

Anent the much consideration being given to our economic order, a great philosopher has said:

“There is in human affairs one order which is best. That order is not always the one which exists, but it is the order which should exist for the greatest good of mankind. God knows it and wills it. We must discover and establish it.”

This order is not to be invented or manufactured, it exists. Like beauty, it shines on us, but we shade our eyes and looking down see shadows and confusion.

In our community affairs (as in personal ones) we acknowledge no derangements until they give us pain and then we are so preoccupied with our “evils” to be relieved by this or that artifice in opposition that we are all but oblivious to the good creative elements in the situation which, if we but permit them, are so ready to expand. And instead of rejoicing and giving reverence to those things which are creative we degrade and hobble them and we call such measures wise and corrective of evils.

There are many creative activities. They range wide — from mere social intercourse through recreational, literary, artistic, educational and religious activities, and from the simple economy of primitive community life to world-wide interrelations of production and exchange. All these are sacred and should be inviolate as God. There are also destructive activities. It is they that violate all the creative. We must learn to distinguish and desist. Plato said, “He shall be as a god to me who can rightly define and divide.”

The present stage of history is marked by vast political organizations the very magnitude of which, perhaps, inspires superstitions, awe and the attribution to them of miraculous powers and virtues. They have only one power: the power to tax. All other powers derive from this power. This power bears upon the creative elements of society and diminishes them. By its nature it cannot create. The only proper use of this power is to establish and maintain conditions of free association — that is, conditions of peace and order and the necessary common highways of communication of every kind with their necessary improvement, equipment and services.

These common services — which cannot be provided privately nor enjoyed otherwise than in common — are the only creative activities that can be performed by the political organization, and this is only so indirectly through maintaining the necessary conditions of non-interference under which creative activities can he freely and effectively carried on. These and only these are the proper and fruitful services of government. The productiveness of the social organism must be watered by these services and immunities. Without this much government men cannot organize and put forth their cultural and economic activities. With more than this they are stifled and enslaved.

Now these public services have a value and they have a cost. Their cost is the taxes which support them. It is an annual cost. Their value is the rent or annual premium which attaches to exclusive locations in proportion to benefits received by or at these locations. We must note that government services are not furnished to individuals as such but only as owners of the locations where the services are performed. The owner, however, receives all the value and advantages of government either immediately, if he is the occupier, or in the location rent if he lets to anyone else.

This value received by the owners either in advantages or in rent is the return from government to them of all the taxes they have paid to support it and, in addition, all the profits created by its operations. In view of these returns to location owners no question can be raised as to the propriety of the tax contribution coming entirely from them. In fact, the owners, even if they desired, could not escape this contribution except at the cost of assuming a greater burden. If the cost of government should be laid otherwise than upon location owners, the imposition of such a burden upon producers would not only subtract from the community wealth but would hinder its production as well, and our location owner would now be reduced to collecting his rents from a community already impoverished annually by more than the amount of the rent. And he is constrained to the spending of such rents as he may obtain in a market oppressed and depleted by taxation.

A tax merely as such is a disservice and must be collected only from him who receives the service created by it. And if the value of this service is not greater than its cost (the tax), there is no advantage in the service being performed and no excuse for such a government to exist. The interest of the location owner therefore constitutes him the natural guardian of honor and efficiency in government administration. Doubtless, the historic predominance of land owners in government and statesmanship has some connection with their having been such large contributors to the cost of government and such heavy sufferers in the revenues received from their lands whenever government has abdicated to anarchy on the one hand or, extending beyond its simple and proper sphere of services, has blighted the creation of and the enjoyment of wealth by its burdens and restrictions — as it does in nearly all lands today,

It is to almost everyone a strange and unaccustomed thought that government should be by and for the landed interest, that the value of its services should contribute exclusively to the revenue of land and that the ills of government badly administered should eventually impair and finally destroy that revenue. This seems a perfect antithesis to the common ideal. But a government economy based exclusively on tax contributions from land owners according to the annual value of their lands, and performing services directed by and delivered wholly to them, is the organic pattern of government to which nature invites us for complete economic freedom and the full enjoyment of all our creative powers.¹⁰⁷²