Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2135

Penciled texts together with Item 2134 in a small, unbound note pad containing mention of Butler Hall, which gives some idea of the date.

 

Original is in item 2134.

 

 

/Land Value/

 

Land value, the exchange value of public services, is the reflex of all other exchange values. It cannot create itself. It is determined by what the community offers for its public services, — always in terms of its own wealth and productivity. Without production there could be no rent or land value. Without free and taxless exchange and thus unrestricted employment and production there are no necessary limits beyond which future..

 

 

5-6/ ..recruit into the body of public administration those persons of greatest interest and capacity in public affairs, thus keeping them at the highest level of efficiency and profit. And all the net income to the owners beyond what they can personally use or consume will, as a matter of course, go for extensions of the public capital and business or be otherwise socially employed or consumed.

 

*Any economic society is fortunate when it has the great bulk of its capital goods under control of those owners who can best administer them and thus make consumers’ goods most abundant. If such persons receive enormous incomes and they are not seized by taxation, they flow back into industry for the increase of capital goods, except such small portion as the recipients of

 

             

Ownership and Democracy

 

All goods or properties in course of exchange and all properties in any way used in connection with exchange are capital goods.

    

The use of capital goods consists only in the administering of them by those who own or hire them. Only by administration of capital goods are any consumers’ goods brought forth.

    

There can be no real and voluntary democracy except in the ownership, administration and exchange of capital goods. When goods are no longer in course of administration and exchange as capital, they are consumers’ goods in the consumer’s hand. They are no longer subject to democratic or economic disposal, although they may at any stage be appropriated (taxed) and transferred from their owners to others by any kind of political power that seizes property.

 

     Different persons owning or having borrowed the same capital goods administer them by combining them and their services in respect of them and also the services of all their employes.

 

Democracy under community ownership of the same property takes the form and practice of parliamentary procedure among the owners.

 

Different persons or groups owning (or having borrowed) different capital goods administer them by exchanging them and their services in respect to them with each other, and also the services of all their employes embodied in them.

 

Democracy under diverse ownerships takes the form and practice of the free market in which the owners (by voice or writing) vote their wishes and desires as to the terms and rates upon which they are willing to redistribute their wealth — their goods and services — and forthwith carry out that redistribution.

 

This democracy of the free market is spontaneous, its decrees requiring no legislative enactment, executive enforcement, or judicial review; no person is moved, except by his own desires, either to exchange or not to do so, but exchanges cannot be effected at other rates than the market prescribes.

 

Politics, practicing the seizure of property cannot be democratic because it is coercive and does not practice exchange.

 

But Public Service can be democratic because service for service is exchange.

 

Land-owners have community of ownership in the public capital and services. It is their function to administer this capital property unitedly and democratically under parliamentary procedures among themselves.

 

The democratic administration of the public services thus democratically created consists in the land-owner coming into

_________________________________

This page especially is not written for loose thinkers.

_________________________________

 

the market and there exchanging, at rates prescribed by the market, such amounts of the public services as are available at their respective locations and receiving in return (credits entitling them to) whatever kinds of goods and services they require for upkeep of the public business and for recompense to themselves for administering the public property and for their democratic distribution of its product by sales to their tenants at rates established in the democracy of the market.

 

Attempts to seize property and administer it coercively under the forms of democracy have always led to economic distress, revolution and dictatorship. But in free markets all the different kinds of capital goods, including public capital, must flow to the hands of those best capable of administering them, for capital is not profitable in the hands of poor administrators. Thus the economic democracy of free ownership, administration and exchange of capital ensures the direction and control of all services, public as well as private, being in the hands of those best qualified to control. In this, the democratic process of administering property by free association and exchange, instead of by seizures and coercion, realizes the aristocratic ideal of service by the best in all departments of economic and political life.

 

The public services thus administered and supervised by democratically organized land owners make their appearance as the rental (or sales) value of the respective holdings. Property in land thus distributes the services over the whole territory and permits of their distribution by exchange and without force. To the individual owners remains this final administrative function of merchandising these services democratically to the general public. This consists of the land owners coming into the general market as they now do, and here selling their shares of the public services, according as they find demand for them at their respective locations and receiving their full market value in return.

 

     Without taxation or any restrictions but, rather, with public aids and services to production, these gross returns must become exceedingly large – far greater than all previous taxes of all kinds and all previous rent combined. And just as in any other business, the income from sales will defray all costs of operation, including ample recompense to the owners for their organized administration of it and for their democratic distribution of its product by sales to the public as tenants at rates which the general market prescribes.

 

     Conduct of the public business democratically without taxing and without being taxed, will yield to its owners profits strictly commensurate with the social value of all public services or social benefits and advantages conferred. The mere purchase and transfer of title to land will ____________

 

6    The practical measures for real estate relief here proposed spring from an objective examination of how the different parts of society are organized so that they can work to the advantage of each other and of the whole, and the whole thus becomes endowed with powers and functions impossible to any of its parts.