Spencer Heath Archive

Item 182

Typed pages by Heath. This item was appended to Item 178 to give it a conclusion, and the resulting essay, titled by MacCallum and Alvin Lowi,

“Society, Its Process and Prospect,” together with subheadings was published in Libertarian Papers 2016.   

April 25, 1950

 

 

     The reason men had less freedom, more poverty and shorter lives in the eighteenth century than they have now is not that they were under more government than now, but that they had then learned to practice among themselves so little of that free relationship of service by contract and exchange, the free enterprise that in the nineteenth century spread so widely over all the Western lands and seas. So today it is not the constant encroachments of government against freedom that spells our doom, if doomed we are, but the failure as yet of our free system to grow into the field of community services that is still dominated by force, just as commerce extended itself into the field of piracy two cen­turies ago. Governments, practicing the rough and ready ways of pirates, destroyed some of them, but piracy itself was abolished only by commerce moving into what was once its exclusive field.

 

    Government is old, very old. Free enterprise is young. In the nineteenth century it took over the field of indivi­dual services, such as food, clothing and housing, from the successors of the ancient slave states and gave to the Western world the first happy era ever known, an era of growing abundance and lengthening life. In the present century freedom — free enterprise — has enormously grown despite the even faster growth of government burdening it down. But it has not extended its scope into the field of common or community services, the traditional preserve of the ancient slave powers in their modern ‘democratic’ forms. We submit to the rude process of government by taxation for want of knowing and practicing any other or free method of providing the services we must have in common one with another. Meantime, society evolves. Property in land slowly develops into the specialized ownership of sites and thereby distributes to their occupants, by the free process of the market, their participation in the common or public services and public capital with which the sites are serviced and supplied. Although site ownership specializes in the contractual distribution of community advantages and services, it is not yet sufficiently organized and aware of its power to administer the public capital on the side of its production and operation as well as its distributive side. This will require the gradual organization of site ownership over areas coextensive with the public capital by which the sites are served. The separate owners will pool their appraised separate titles in a trusteeship or working corporation and take proportionate undivided interests in return. The organization will then not only distribute its sites and resources to the most eligible and productive lessees; it will undertake supervision of the community budget, protect all its present and prospective lessees against political inefficiency and corruption, thereby administering the public capital, and finally take over the entire administration of the public capital and the common services that it provides.

 

      This taking over will not be a reform of politics but a positive growth of society, for each step forward will be the result of actual benefits that all parties receive. Even the political place-holders will be happy to become employees and officers of the solvent, productive and highly enterprising organization of community business. As its services expand so will its profits and wealth. Eventually the individual equities or shares will become widely held and will become the property qualification under which popular elections, as in other business organizations, will be held. Deficit financing will be a thing of the past, and a normally functioning society, solvent and free, will be at last achieved.