Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2134

Penciled text together with Item 2135 in a small, unbound note pad containing mention of Butler Hall, which gives some idea of the date.

 

White envelope has items 2134 & 2135.

 

 

Retrospect and Prospect

 

When a population migrates from a land of debts and deficits and high taxation into a land of no deficits and slight taxation there is a phenomenal creation of land values, such as took place in nineteenth century America.

     These people brought with them no capacities or facilities for wealth production any greater nor even as great as they had in the old lands, but they did leave behind them the losses that the seizing of their property for taxes had imposed and the crushing burdens that the mis-spending of those taxes to regulate their businesses and limit their employment entailed.

     With relatively free and taxless production, and exchange, so great became the need and demand and ability to pay for necessary public services (principally the maintenance of internal peace and ways of communication for free exchange) that fabulous land values sprang up upon the sites where this demand arose and these services were supplied. But rising debt and taxation and increasing restraints on business and production, financed by taxation, are now preventing employment and so limiting any production that the effective demand for access to public services fails and land values no longer rise.

     A great reduction or abolition of coercive taxation with its consequent evils would have the same economic effects on the present population as would its transfer to a new continent fully equipped with all services and facilities of production like the one they left behind, and this without any of the inconveniences of migration or frontier life.

     Such a release of productive capacity could produce unimaginable wealth, and the value of land would again leap to such further heights as we can dream but little more than could the early Dutchmen of Lower New York.