Spencer Heath Archive

Item 756

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath, Title supplied.

May 2, 1956

    

 

/HONORING HENRY GEORGE/

 

Henry George was a literary artist. What made him so was that he was at heart a poet. And like all poets, his spiritual insight through his intuitions carried him into higher realms into which his reason alone was not able to rise. The poetic faculty is old. Reason, as an attribute of man, is young, recently born and but as yet little developed and but little used. The general principles that he laid down had their authentic source in his unconscious — akin to the cosmic.

     His basic concept was the spiritual nature, the potentially creative power of man, and that the key to its development rests in the freedom of the human spirit. And this freedom was not mere freedom from violence at the hand of his fellow man, not freedom from but freedom with his fellow man. This he called the “law of human progress,” the law of freedom in association in which alone man could come into his divinity as co-creator with God.

     This wonderful principle, however, needed to be applied. And in his application, the whole reasoning of Henry George in his economic argument rested on the hidden premise that freedom was in the gift of the political state. With this false premise, his reason took over and led him to appeal to Caesar, to the sword of taxation to sever the chains and open the doors to liberty — taxation by the worldly power.

     Thus reason led him far afield from his general principle. Yet he was not without his intimations that there was more beyond. In the second paragraph of his Preface to the Fourth Edition of Progress and Poverty, he writes, “What I have most endeavored to do is to establish general principles, trusting to my readers to carry further their applications where this is needed.”

For his poetic insight and for his popularizing the idea of freedom — and that it was in the heart of nature awaiting its discovery and application of men — the world is indebted to Henry George. It still remains for his readers to carry further its application than he had done.

     He made great illumination of rent as a voluntary revenue designed and provided by nature to provide for the common or community needs of mankind. It was only in the application of this principle in nature that he fell short. For he urged the administration of rent by the political and coercive authority, based upon force instead of upon the social and creative relationship of contract in which none but owners can engage. Apart from the common and community services of mankind, Henry George was a most brilliant, most trenchant and most uncompromising advocate of the contractual in place of the coercive relationship — in absolute free trade for the non-coercive distribution of all things modified by the hands of man, for the free distribution of all the gifts from man to man. For distribution of the gifts of nature alone did he rely on coercive power. Free trade in all else, but no free trade in land.