Spencer Heath Archive

Item 499

Penciling on notepad paper

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There is, as yet, very little understanding of the broad principles underlying the normal system of free enterprise through voluntary contracts and exchanges that during the very recent centuries has risen waveringly under the burdens and restrictions of the qualified sovereignties that arose upon the ruins of their historic predecessors, the wholly political and totalitarian slave states.

Until the Renaissance (roughly) there was no world-wide system of voluntary exchange with voluntarily accumulated property administered as productive capital, nor was there any considerable accumulations of property except by conquest, slavery, tribute and taxation, and this not for any productive administration but only to be dissipated in war, waste, cor­ruption and vainglorious display.

The free enterprise system is founded on the voluntary and not the forcible — the political or coercive — concentra­tion of properties and their productive administration in the service of expanding circles of patrons and purchasers as its necessarily prime and immediate beneficiaries. Civi­lization, in its modern form at least, thus depends upon the free accumulation and concentration of property by its owners as productive capital, as against political and coercive expropriations and profligate dissipation by non-owners.

Administration of property by its owners is the key to a free as distinguished from a slave civilization; for property, proprietary jurisdiction over its subject-matters, is the first essential to any contract — to all free and contractual as against political and coercive relationships, to what makes men prosperous and free as against what makes them impoverished and enslaved. A free community therefore is one whose natural and social advantages are administered by the social and voluntary instead of the political and coercive process. It is one where the mores are such that its titles are respected and its sites and resources therefore can be distributed (and redistributed) by the contractual instead of the political and coercive process and in which the recompense (ground rent) for this prime community service is automatic and directly proportionate to the public need and to the excellence with which the service is performed. And this public community service, so recompensed, affords that basic security of peaceable possession, that freedom from force, without which no other freedom of production and exchange could be enjoyed. Thus free trade in sites and resources, in land, affords the prime example in nature of Henry George’s fundamental philosophy of social freedom under which land value, as ground rent, is the natural revenue flowing directly in exchange and recompense for basic public service.

In these times when the contractual and responsible ownership of property as productive capital that serves others is being progressively destroyed by the political powers it is well to discover that property in land with its contractual administration of sites and resources is the natural and fundamental agency of public service in the organic free community. Is it not more than coincidence that this social institution is usually the first to be attacked and destroyed when freedom is lost and a population reverts completely to the totalitarian slave state.