Spencer Heath Archive

Item 192

Pencil by Heath on lined notepad paper.

No date

Original => Item 191

     Six men fish and hunt for food and clothing.

     They take only wild things and produce nothing. Live poorly.

     Cannot sow or reap nor breed domestic animals because they are predatory also on each other.

     One of them, aided by two others, seizes the best land and calls it his.

     The other three must now fish and hunt on poorer land.

 

Or

 

     Occupy the owned land by consent of the owner.

     They can do this because the owner protects them from each other.

     This makes it possible for them to produce.

     The owner marks off seven plots — three fortified, three enclosed, one open and unenclosed.

     He occupies one. His aids, two others. They protect all of the seven plots.

     The remaining three come to the open plot seeking the three enclosed ones.

     But they cannot strive against each other for the enclosed plots because they are enclosed and protected.

     They must therefore bid against each other for the three enclosed plots.

     Each offers the owner part of his produce.

     The most productive man bids the most for the most desired plot.

     Each man gets the enclosed and protected lot for which he makes the highest bid.

     In consequence of their security and protection from each other each man now can produce. His plot is not now depleted by him. It yields him an increase. Out of this increase he pays rent. He is no longer predatory on the land or on the other men.

     He is in a community — a place where there is protection in common for all. He has become a free-man under the protection given by his land-giver, or land-lord.

     The three men render (rent) the agreed portions of their produce to their land lord.

     The land lord divides the rent into three parts. Two parts he gives to his two strong men by agreement with them. They have paid their rent in services to him and to his land.

     They have given public services to the public owner. They are paid out of the public revenue or rent.

     The remaining part of the rent is retained by the land-lord.

     This is his recompense for his administration of the public services.

     The whole rent pays for all the public services. The part paid out by the lord pays for all the public services he hires or buys. The part retained by him pays for the administrative part of the public services that he himself performs.

     Each tenant or free man now produces far more than formerly he was able to seize, but above paying rent he finds himself with a relative surplus of some things and a relative insufficiency of other things.

     So each free man takes his surplus to the open and unenclosed public plot.

     He puts it to the use and disposal of others. Thus he converts it into capital. He owns it no longer for his own use but for the use and service of others.

     The total of contributions to the open (but protected) place constitutes a market and the open plot (or a portion of it) becomes a market place for the peaceable (contractual)distribution of the use and ownership of surplus or capital goods by the same method of offer and bid by which the land lord made distribution of his enclosed and well protected lands.

(Describe here the market)

     The community now has two kinds of protected lands: Those that are private and enclosed and those that are public and unenclosed (or given over exclusively to public use).

     The owner (or owners if more than one) owns exclusively only the enclosed plot occupied by him. He owns administratively (as capital is owned) all the enclosed portions that he distributes to others and all the unenclosed (public) portions including any public capital (public improvements) that has been applied to them.

     Through the market place he distributes possession of all the enclosed portions from which the producing free men pay rent out of their production.¹⁹²