Spencer Heath Archive

Item 122

Pencil draft by Heath on three folded sheets of 8½ x 11 paper, for a letter to an unidentified person.

No date

     It pleases me much to note that your publications point more and more towards the services that command the voluntary measured recompenses called values instead of to government coercions that diminish exchanges and thus prevent recompenses and destroy values. I shall be yet more pleased when you teach that exchange of services, either current or impressed on properties or commodities, by the contract process is the only practice of freedom and the only organic and productive relationship that unites large numbers of men — that ownership is prerequisite to contract, property thus the basis of freedom.

     If the power of government be limited to preventing violence and keeping the peace, how shall that limitation be imposed or enforced? And how shall government be maintained if denied the king’s prerogative of seizing property or funds be denied to it? Yet how can the same power to tax not become a power to destroy? Even a modicum of taxes must unbalance the system of exchange, for those who contribute to the system must take out less than they put in and hardship ensues. Those who contribute least must suffer proportionately most. This calls for intervention and remedy by the power that forced the distress and this necessitates further taxation to support the intervention — and thus the vicious cycles whose end is despotism.

     The dilemma is real, for make no mistake, violence is the seed bed and taxation the tap root of the totalitarian state. Until the problem is solved there is no hope for a free but the certainty of a more and more restricted economy whether we will or no. All the mere resistance, reform or deference in the world can only for a time postpone the evil end.

     I should like to /see/ the problem manfully attacked. Let us try this approach:

     Freedom from violence appertains not the persons but to the place wherein they are. The place must be a community — a com-munio, place of common defense. The safety and security, the immunities, such a place affords — the advantages above disadvantages of it — can be enjoyed only by those who occupy it. For this they hold secure possession and enjoy its advantages and immunities by contract under lease or deed and for which they pay ground rent or its value capitalized as purchase price. The rent so paid is set not by either party alone but by the democracy of the common market, and it rises and falls as the security and advantages appertaining to each plot increase or diminish. And the rent so paid only to the owner, for none but an owner can be in any relation of free contract towards an occupier with respect to the security and other services or advantages afforded by his occupancy. If he holds under any other authority, he holds by sufferance only and is not a free man but either a pampered favorite or a tax-paying slave or serf in servitude to political masters pretending as servants, or to a king or other master politician.

     As a rent payer the occupier is a free-man because what he pays is gauged to his immunities and advantages and to his consent. But as a tax payer he is a serf because what he pays is inverse to his security and gauged to nothing but the will and power of the usurper, conqueror or elected authority over him. This authority cannot do for him but only to him and to his undoing as a free man. Such authority, being non-contractual, must first enslave him before it can serve him, and such service only deepens his slavery.

     The land lord, however, in these modern times, receives only in proportion as he serves. His primary service is as an impartial distributor of sites and resources into such hands as can make them most productive and can therefore pay the highest rental for them. In the modern process and evolution of community life or society this distributive function of land ownership is practiced only blindly and empirically with unenlightened motivation and without being understood. As land owners become enlightened as to the service they now perform and how their incomes and values are gauged to it, they will be impelled to undertake other and further services looking to the safety and security of their communities and the common welfare of the inhabitants who pay rent freely for what they already enjoy.

     For this purpose they will unite in a corporate or similar form on a regional basis, pooling their individual ownerships and taking corresponding undivided interests in the form of corporate shares. Thenceforth all former income will go to the Corporation as rent and to its shareholders as earnings or dividends. From this point there will be no separation of interest as between the formerly separate owners. Each will now hold his proportionate undivided interest in the entire community of property held by the corporation. His interest will not be in any particular rent or property but in the community property as a whole, that it shall provide the highest immunities and advantages to its inhabitants and thereby yield the highest combined and total rents and revenues.

     Thus there will be established a unitary community ownership and authority powerful and influential, having no motivation but the community welfare, automatically financed with voluntary revenues in proportion as it contributes to that welfare and in like manner penalized in degree as it fails so to do. Its general policies will be dictated by vote of its possibly very numerous owners, and they will be carried out by persons of highly specialized qualifications /engaged/ for that purpose as officers and employees.

 

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                                   /Item 122 above amended by MacCallum for                                     possible inclusion as a Heath Short Essay/

 

 

SOLVING THE DILEMMA OF POLITICS

 

     Voluntary, measured exchange by the contract process is the only practice of freedom and the only organic and productive relationship that unites large numbers of men. Because ownership is prerequisite to contract, property is thus the basis of freedom.

     If the power of government be limited to preventing violence and keeping the peace, how shall that limitation be imposed or enforced? And how shall government be maintained if denied the king’s prerogative of seizing property or funds be denied to it? Yet how can the same power to tax not become a power to destroy? Even a modicum of taxes must unbalance the system of exchange, for those who contribute to the system must take out less than they put in and hardship ensues. Those who contribute least must suffer proportionately most. This calls for intervention and remedy by the power that forced the distress and this necessitates further taxation to support the intervention — and thus the vicious cycles whose end is despotism.

     The dilemma is real, for make no mistake, violence is the seed bed and taxation the tap root of the totalitarian state. Until the problem is solved there is no hope for a free but the certainty of a more and more restricted economy whether we will or no. All the mere resistance, reform or deference in the world can only for a time postpone the evil end.

     I should like to see the problem manfully attacked. Let us try this approach:

     Freedom from violence appertains not the persons but to the place wherein they are. The place must be a community — a com-munio, place of common defense. The safety and security, the immunities, such a place affords — the advantages above disadvantages of it — can be enjoyed only by those who occupy it. For this they hold secure possession and enjoy its advantages and immunities by contract under lease or deed, for which they pay ground rent or its value capitalized as purchase price. The rent so paid is set not by either party alone but by the democracy of the common market, and it rises and falls as the security and advantages appertaining to each plot increase or diminish. And the rent is paid only to the owner, for none but an owner can be in any relation of free contract towards an occupier with respect to the security and other services or advantages afforded by his occupancy. If he holds under any other authority, he holds by sufferance only and is not a free man but either a pampered favorite or a tax-paying slave or serf in servitude to political masters pretending as servants, or to a king or other master politician.

     As a rent payer, the occupier is a free-man because what he pays is gauged to his immunities and advantages and to his consent. But as a tax payer he is a serf because what he pays is inverse to his security and gauged to nothing but the will and power of the usurper, conqueror or elected authority over him. This authority cannot do for him but only to him and to his undoing as a free man. Such authority, being non-contractual, must first enslave him before it can serve him, and such service only deepens his slavery.

     The land lord, however, in these modern times, receives only in proportion as he serves. His primary service is as an impartial distributor of sites and resources into such hands as can make them most productive and can therefore pay the highest rental for them. In the modern process and evolution of community life or society this distributive function of land ownership is practiced only blindly and empirically with unenlightened motivation and without being understood. As land owners become enlightened as to the service they now perform and how their incomes and values are gauged to it, they will be impelled to undertake other and further services looking to the safety and security of their communities and the common welfare of the inhabitants who pay rent freely for what they already enjoy.

     For this purpose they will unite in a corporate or similar form on a regional basis, pooling their individual ownerships and taking corresponding undivided interests in the form of corporate shares. Thenceforth all former income will go to the Corporation as rent and to its shareholders as earnings or dividends. From this point there will be no separation of interest as between the formerly separate owners. Each will now hold his proportionate undivided interest in the entire community of property held by the corporation. His interest will not be in any particular rent or property but in the community property as a whole, that it shall provide the highest immunities and advantages to its inhabitants and thereby yield the highest combined and total rents and revenues.

     Thus there will be established a unitary community ownership and authority powerful and influential, having no motivation but the community welfare, automatically financed with voluntary revenues in proportion as it contributes to that welfare and in like manner penalized in degree as it fails so to do. Its general policies will be dictated by vote of its possibly very numerous owners, and they will be carried out by persons of highly specialized qualifications engaged for that purpose as officers and employees.