Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2922

14 typed pages with slight penciled amendments by Heath but not identified in any way. Page 8 is either missing or mis-numbered. Spencer MacCallum believes this may be a condensation by Heath’s friend, Ethel Clyde (of the Clyde Line), of Heath’s “Energy Concept of Population,” of which condensation Heath once remarked that she left out whatever she didn’t understand. Added at the end is an additional page, titled “SYNOPSIS,” which was found with this Item but may or may not belong with it.

 

 

 SOCIONOMY

   The Science of Society

Socionomy is an application of the laws of the natural sciences to society.

 Science describes things by analyzing them. Applied science synthesizes the elements of mass, motion, and duration. Science is quantitative in method, qualitative in its effects. It describes things in terms of their relationships. It differs from ordinary knowledge in that it is generalized and thus realizable forward into particular experience.

 Modern science tends increasingly to view energy as the fundamental entity of all existence. Life is a stream of energy. Population is a manifestation of that stream.

 In socionomy, the average life-year is taken as the unit of energy employed in a scientific analysis of the societal life-form. This energy corresponds with the erg-second or horsepower-hour. One average person living one year would represent the energy of a single life-year.

 Society, as a complex life-form, is the integration of the mass, motion and duration of the units of which it is composed.

 This new science, socionomy, treats exclusively of relation­ships among men that integrate them into the societal life-form. This life-form is conceived as energy arising out of the universal cosmos and having capacity to maintain itself by continuous reception and discharge of energy taken from and returned to its immediate environment.

 The first thing to be analyzed is the structure of society itself and the interfunctioning of its parts, in terms of mass, motion and duration. Next, its functioning as affecting its environment and finally, its creative upbuilding of itself through the recreation of its objective world.

 Individual man adjusts himself to his environment; collective and social-ized man adjusts the environment to himself.

 Since the population or energy constituting a society is constituted of living units organized together, it is a living organism with power to perpetuate itself in successive generations. The energy-stream manifested in a succession of generations constitutes a societal life-stream.

 Each generation may be regarded as a definite quantity of energy made up of lesser quantities of unequal power and duration, but having an average magnitude.

A stream of population energy treated as a succession of energy waves is susceptible of important transformations through alterations of the length and frequency of those waves. These energy transformations are of high significance as affording the field for positively qualitative techniques in the practical applica­tion of this science of society.

 A population with no greater number of life-years in a generation but with longer lives, is more creative – there is no necessary quantitative difference but there is a qualitative distinction.

 However active an individual may be, if his life is of short duration, his creative power is small. The shorter the life-span of a population the greater the re-productivity and the less the productivity, since the early years of maturity are the most reproductive and the later years the most productive.

 The quality of a population depends upon the quantity of its life-years that extend beyond the period of immaturity, for there is little productivity in a population whose powers are fully absorbed in maintenance and replacement.

 modern man’s control over nature gives a social-ized population power to extend its days and total life-years per generation, even though its births should decline.

 Animals and primitive men do not create their subsistence; they consume and exhaust that which their environment affords. As subsistence diminishes, their numbers increase under threat of extinction, until few live beyond maturity and only the “fittest” survive.

 Under adverse circumstances, shortened lives are eugenic, since the result is greater reproductivity from which favorable variations and mutations may arise.

 Vital statistics show compensatory changes in the birth rate.[1] Under deterioration of social technique such as tyranny, slavery, etc. the life-span decreases and the numbers increase, but if the mean life span falls below the age of reproduction, an actual decrease in numbers results.

 From the socio-biologic and scientific point of view, the current struggle, like all previous ones, is a rearrangement of the mass, motion and duration factors of the population energy involved. This descent of governments into a more acutely anti-social relationship toward each other, with resort to the crudest forms of compulsion and destruction, is a primitive manifestation of erstwhile social energy that has been de-social-ized by the abrogation of contractual relation­ships.

 In the atomic world, as in the astronomical, the highest organization and continuity is attributed to those systems in which the units move most freely; where there is collision there is disintegration and disorganization.

 The practice of contractual relations among men lengthens the life-span by displacing collision and conflict. Under the propitious conditions of societal life, men rise to higher

creative power.

The integration of energy into higher and more complex struct­ures is growth. When energy flows through and maintains them, these structures function; when structures cease to function they disintegrate and death results.

 Reality (energy) does not come into being, nor does it pass; only the form changes. Birth and death are but transformations of universal energy.

 

 

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The Nineteenth Century has been called the Century of Democracy. To the democracy of the market during that period was due the vast extension of the average life-span. There was an un­precedented expansion of production and trade and the area of contractual relationships enormously increased.

Under economic democracy the market re-distributes social-ized wealth among those who have contributed to it. This is fundamental democracy. Political democracy, at its best, only mitigates the rigors of political tyranny.

 The market is the foundation of social freedom. In the market a man must give services or products in order to receive them, thus advancing the welfare of both the individual and the group, and raising the duration of individual lives. As wealth is produced and exchanged, the environment is favorably transformed.

 

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The cosmic energy that is organized into individual man or a generation of men, is a biological, not a distinctively social or societal manifestation.

 Only the energy a society possesses above that essential to reproduction and replacement can function at the social level.

 The social process is that of free and non-violent energy transfers. These energy transfers are mutual. They are carried on by contract, consent and exchange. It is essential that things be owned, for only those things that are owned can be exchanged. The convention of ownership therefore is essential with respect to land, and to all the labor products thereof.

 

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Recognition of property is the indispensable basis for any distribution of lands or goods without violence. For civilized man the ownership of property is not mere possession: savages and animals may have that; it is the socially-recognized authority to make contracts as to its possession, use or exchange. All primitive peoples who evolve from violent and destructive relations towards each other and towards their environment, do so by adoption of contractual relations instead of force.

 The first requisite to community life is a social distribution of its sites and resources.

 The social=ization of a thing as the term is here used is the practice of contractual relations with regard to its disposition and use. Ownership, therefore, must precede social-ization.

 When, by common consent, society accepts the claims of those in possession, thenceforth all changes of ownership are by a peaceful process of consent that gives a security of possession theretofore unknown.

 The making of a social distribution of sites and resources, by the voluntarily accepted proprietors, is the primary social service by means of which men achieve the possibility of freedom, instead of tyranny, compulsion and force.

 The only constructive use of force is against those who attempt other than the exchange relationship. Such people are outlaws and must be restrained.

 The contractual relationships of ownership of property, and of services exchanged on the basis of agreement and consent, extended to include community property and services, will bring all available but unsocial-ized energy into creative service. It will then cease to manifest itself in tyrannies and recurrent wars.

 The institution of property in land in its present state of development performs only rudimentary services. But it has unlimited potentiality for future public service contractually performed.

 The three basic needs of society – security, property, and inspiration – are supplied through politics and government, commerce and trade, and religion and the arts. Under these institutions all social advance is made.

 The societal life-form has one organ (government) that exercises force – physical, mechanical and compulsive.

 Government is destined to be assimilated into the voluntary exchange system, for the performance of community services, protection of society against the violation of its members or processes, and for the rehabilitation of those who have committed anti-social acts, called crimes.

 Society has a second basic organ (its economic system) that provides for its material needs. This is a contractual system of exchange under which all organized industry is carried on.

 The third great structure of society embraces all matters of the intellect, imagination and the creative arts.

 The positive social trend is toward the evolution of coercion into service for service, and hence towards the supremacy of the intellectual, artistic and inspirational elements of human life and affairs.

 The assumption of responsibility for public protection and for all community services by the proprietors of the community lands, adequately organized for concerted action, will introduce a free contractual technique in lieu of the prevailing political tyranny.

 When the community authority rests upon community ownership and practices no coercion, but only free contractual relationships with the community members, the entire available energy of adult life-years can be applied to the production and mutual exchange of services and goods.

 As the free technique of the market becomes universal, production will rise above the material needs of mankind, and the lengthening life-years of the race will be devoted only in small part to the production of material things.

 Periods of relatively great contractual organization and creative social power are followed by periods of social decline.

 The assumed benefits of government, by force through taxation, are seldom weighed against their cost. The obvious advantages thus obtained by individuals or classes, whether aristocratic or proletarian, obscure the destructive effect upon civilization.

 Rent, or so-called “unearned increment” is the amount of recompense that the community awards for the valuable services of distribution and administration of land and resources.

 The social and contractual distribution of sites and resources carries with it access to and use of the community improvements and any other public capital that exists.

 The ownership of land is the foundation on which the community rests.

 The Saxon proprietary system developed free institutions that gave fame to the age of Alfred in the tenth century. These institutions were submerged by the Norman invasion and totalitarian rule.

 The Western World has been so long indoctrinated with the classical Norman tradition of political rulership over tribute-burdened populations that any proposal to mould public institutions to the basic pattern of free patriarchal or feudal communities is almost certain to be decried as a return to barbarism. Yet history affords the striking example of proprietary government as contractual service that produced a state of general well-being during five hundred years, in marked contrast to the darkness and degradation that prevailed in the contemporary Western World.

 In a modern hotel we find an organized community. Every­thing enjoyed therein is managed for the inhabitants by the proprietary authority, under voluntary contracts, without coercion or force.

 The proprietary technique of community services performed for recompenses voluntarily and contractually determined, would draw the ablest administrators into extensive ownership of community lands and resources, and would result in a tremendous increase of economic production and exchange.

 Land owners do not produce land, any more than distributors of merchandise produce the goods they distribute. The open market awards the recompense in both cases.

 In periods of expanding contractual freedom with consequent rising productivity there is a growing demand for contractual distribu­tion of land, hence there is a higher recompense for it. During periods of more restricted productivity much land passes out of use. During such periods the owners of unused land can perform only potential services with respect to its distribution. These services are the same as those performed by the distributors of other kinds of property or services when they keep them available against the day that shall bring them again into active, perhaps urgent, demand.

 Periods of diminishing contractual freedom are periods of rising dis-employment and idleness of capital. In such periods many owners are compelled to relinquish their lands to the public authority. Such governmental liquidation of ownership, if indefinitely continued, would put the distribution of land under political instead of proprietary control.

 The public service now performed by land owners includes the non-violent and non-discriminatory distribution of the community advantages, sites and lands. By extending these services, government can be transformed from a tyranny into an agency of highly recompensed public services.

 The present tendency towards totalitarian domination results in the destructive administration of property by persons who do not own it. This is a menace to the future of society and of civilization. It guarantees lower subsistence levels and recurrent wars.

 All civilized communities obtain basic public services through the institution of property in land — thus preventing anarchy on the one hand and tyranny on the other.

 When the potentialities of this technique are realized it will be used ever more widely and will receive honorable and voluntary rewards.

 The voluntary recompense coming to the owner-administrators for service and for protection against violence, would render taxation and like compulsions profitless and vain.

 The contrast between public service by public owners and the depredations of a political administration is as between civiliza­tion and the tyranny that, if continued, must be its doom.

 When the full proprietary relationship that the institution of property in land bears to the administration of public capital and community services is recognized it cannot fail to draw the land-owning interests into an organization for such consciously planned public services as will bring to them in rents and values the highest profits and rewards.

 All profit is dependent upon service. No apology is offered for this purely business basis for a scientific social advance.

 If there is to be freedom, profit, plenty and peace, the landowners of each community must unite for the relief and protection of the inhabitants, in exchange for the new ground rent sure to arise out of the productivity such public services will release.

 The phenomenon of society is a part of the cosmic whole, underlying which there is a basic unity of process and principle.

 

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The customary term for a measure of socialized energy is value.

 A physically distinguishable quantity of human energy, either as a service or as a commodity, is social-ized, through the contractual process by which it is contributed to the Market. Under the common law of the Market its mechanism of competition automatically measures this socialized energy in terms of the prevailing measuring unit – such as the dollar.

 

/Page 8 is missing, unless it was mispaginated./

 

The customary term for social energy is service, and the term for its measurement is value. A service may be defined as a quantity of energy that is social-ized and therefore has value.

 The ordinary transactions of the market are fundamentally exchanges of social-ized energy as services.

 The energy of exchange does not flow without resistance…that is, without restrictions called regulations, usually approved by popular sentiment and applied by the coercive public authorities that continuous­ly de-social-ize a large part of this energy.

 ALL the interrelated activities of a population are either contract­ual and social or coercive and anti-social.

 The practical application of Socionomy, as a Science of Society, must consist of the conscious and rational extension of the contractual – the service – process into the field of public service.

 The institution of property in land, in its present state of development, performs only rudimentary services.

 Public affairs are for the most part still under political and compulsive, instead of proprietary and contractual administration. This accounts for the friction that retards the free interflow of social-ized energies and causes them to be dissipated in crimes and wars.

 It is the potential function of property in land, through the distribution of sites and resources, with access to public improvements, not only to distribute these to the most productive occupiers and users, but also to provide protection and such other services as will call forth the voluntary recompense called land value or ground rent.

 No social institution has been so quietly taken for granted as necessary and essentially sound as the institution of property in land. This institution is essential to the continuance of organized society.

 The only dominion that an owner can exercise over his wealth without having its value disappear is through its administration for the production and bringing of goods and services to the consumer.

 The belief that taxation, instead of rent, is the normal and honest revenue of a community — that private use instead of public administration over land is the true function of its ownership – is fallacious. It is forgotten that in Saxon England where there was no tax system, land-lord and free-men were reciprocal terms – that serfdom was only a later consequence of Roman taxation under Norman rule.

 All wealth that is used to prepare and provide products or services for others is capital wealth – in other words, only that wealth functioning within the contract and exchange system is capital wealth.

 Capital is wealth that is owned and used for the benefit of others – social-ized wealth.

 Goods that have passed into the consumers’ hands are no longer capital or social-ized goods used for the service of others. When privately owned goods reach their final possessors without force or fraud, through the legitimate processes of voluntary exchange, and are not used for any injury to others, they are not of public concern.

 It is the same with privately owned and occupied land – either it has not entered into, or it has passed out of the exchange system. All other privately owned land is analogous to capital wealth.

 Ground rents, taken in the aggregate, are the exchange equi­valent that a community renders to the owners of land for their services in distributing the security of possession and access to public benefits that the community members thereby enjoy,

 This is the justification for the institution of property in land as it now stands. So far as it is permitted to operate – so far as the owners are not taxed out of their ownership – it is the instrument whereby security of possession to land users is guaranteed. Only by the services of land owners can public operations be consummated into exchange values.

 The institution of property in land could be the largest, most productive and most profitable business in the world – in which the slightest neglect of the public interest, or the least corruption, would be penalized by a decline in rents and values, while honor and profit would be the rewards of public enterprise and efficiency.

 When the real nature and services of property in land become known, owners will organize for wider administrative services, authority and responsibility than they now assume. For these services they will receive enormous increase in rents and values.

 The amount of rent paid for community services depends upon their exchange or market value as it appears in connection with different plots, according to their size and location, and the demand for them. This is fixed by the owners in different communities offering their services in competition with each other, thereby pressing rents down. Those who would occupy the plots and enjoy the services they afford, bid upward against each other until both sides of the market agree as to the rent.

 It is highly advantageous to all parties that the real owners of capital engaged in any service or enterprise should direct and administer that enterprise. This applies as much to the proprietors of public capital engaged in public enterprise, as to private owners of private capital engaged in private enterprise.

 Every act of good administration by the landlords would be rewarded with increased rents for that location, while any lapse from good administration would be penalized by diminishing returns.

 Present taxation causes both unemployment and under production, thus reduces the demand for land. It is demand that gives land value — it has no value in itself. No service or commodity has other value than that caused by demand.

 What the proprietors of land sell is the net public services received by the occupants of their sites. They put the land into possession of those tenants who can make the greatest use of those services.

 It would be difficult to imagine such services being as well performed by salaried officers paid through taxation and not having their pay directly dependent upon their selling the public services efficiently and honestly.

 Political public servants, in the aggregate, are permitted to fix their own salaries and expenses, and to pay themselves, not by any exchange of services, but out of their seizures by taxation and out of their public borrowings on the faith of future seizures.

 Coercive taxation causes diminished productivity. This causes diminished ability to pay rent for public services.

 Under our present system of taxation land values and rents must in time decline.

 The net value of land is the amount left after all taxes and other charges, direct and indirect, have been deducted from the gross advant­ages of the public services. This net value is all that the proprietors can sell, and it is only by enlarging this net value that their various incomes can be increased.

 In most places there is a far greater supply of public services than there is demand for them. Much property that should be benefitted by these services is entirely unoccupied and yields no revenue, much is so poorly improved that the income from it fails to pay even local taxes.

 Land that yields no revenue is still considered to have value. It is not realized that demand is as essential to value as is supply. The value of land in a community cannot be greater than the effective demand for the services that it affords.

 Generally speaking, public facilities are provided and maintained through taxation – they are not supplied in response to an economic demand on the part of those who /are/ compelled to pay for them through taxation.

 Private services are provided by, exchanged between, and distributed among private persons. It is these private services that create all private wealth and all demand for the public services to land for which rent is paid.

 Any restriction placed upon private industry reduces its capacity to make use of public services or other community resources, and thus reduces the demand for land. The taxation now imposed for the purpose of paying public servants is such a burden upon industry that it greatly reduces the demand for public services, and consequently the rental value of land.

 Taxes are always a charge against rent; never rent against taxes. Taxes are always collected by force (direct taxation) or by stealth (indirect taxation). Rent is collected only by contract and consent.

 Land owners perform the great public service of merchandising the community’s resources and advantages into the most productive hands. Rent is payment to them for this great public service.

 Organized land owners would have a unique opportunity vastly to increase, at the same time, the public welfare and their private fortunes. The initial obstacles are small, and the rewards would be great. The highest service to self would mean the best service to others.

 Being the purveyors of public services in exchange for rent, land owners depend for their revenue upon the productiveness and prosperity of others.

 Land owners should realize that all taxation is anti-social — a burden upon land value and rent. With the removal of the burden of taxation, industry would expand, the demand for the use of land and of public services would increase and the market value therefore would be cheerfully paid.

 The boom in rents and values could not collapse, since it would be based upon the actual production of wealth, not upon debts and obligations that can never be paid.

 Increasing taxes always means increasing public distress, whereas improvement in the economic condition of the people increases rent.

 As taxation reduces production and therefore the incomes of users of land, so reduction of taxes at once restores the earnings of land users and thus increases the demand for and the value of land. It is not sufficient to ease the burden of taxation upon real estate; this burden must be removed from all forms of production and exchange that create the wealth and services upon which the demand for real estate rests.

 Of tremendous importance to owners of property is the knowledge that any tax relief they procure for their tenants or purchasers will be awarded them in rents and selling values in far greater measure than the amount by which those tenants or purchasers are relieved.

 Rent is no burden to the land user, even though it should exceed the amount of taxes from which he is exempted. He pays for services he desires a price no greater than he can afford to pay.

 Relief of rent from taxation cannot benefit the owner above the amount of the taxes actually lifted, a tax relief for improvements or other capital not only relieves the improvements but increases rents and sales values by an amount far greater than the amount of taxes remitted.

 It is far more vital to the value and income of land that the improvements and use of land should be exempted than that taxation should be lifted directly from the land.

 

 Obviously the first taxes that the land owners should endeavor to have removed are those that fall upon the sources of their income — those that are a burden to the payers of rent — not necessarily the taxes that are highest, but those that are the most injurious in their effects.

 With taxes on production abolished and ground rent thus enormously increased only a small part of it would be required to support public services at existing levels. This would be contributed voluntarily by the landlords as money turned back into their business to maintain operation and increase profits.

 The proprietary interest then becomes responsible for super­vision over the public servants as a part of the intelligent administration of the public capital from which it derives its income.

 Those persons having the greatest capacity for public administration will gravitate away from private enterprises into public ones. As public administration of large enterprises becomes more economical in production and more profitable in results, it will attract not only the surplus earnings and credit of the proprietary interests, but also a portion of the capital now invested in private enter­prises will be invested in these more profitable public and proprietary ones.

 There are excellent reasons to anticipate that under equally skillful administration by its owners, the capital invested in public enterprises would be more efficient and therefore more productive of income and values than would similar capital under private administra­tion. This would cause a natural preponderance of capital investment in the public and more profitable enterprises, thus supplying the proprietary interest with additional funds for buying into the assets of the private enterprises and thus eventually taking them over by the will of all concerned.

 Private capital services would be in constant competition with corresponding public capital services and would not come under public administration until all concerned desired that they should — since greater profits for all would result. There would always remain the possibility of renewed competition by private capital should the services of public capital prove inadequate or unsatisfactory. There will always be a modicum of private services such as those that grow out of new discoveries in science and begin on a small scale.

 The only authentic and legitimate services of government are those given to its territory. Such services are necessarily distributed by the community owners. It follows, therefore, that when land owners become properly (democratically) organized they will become the administrators of the largest, most necessary, and therefore when well conducted, the most profitable business in the entire world — the business of government as the organizer, producer and distributor of community services on a measured market basis and for value received.

 Thus will politics and economics be reconciled at last, government social-ized, and society made secure.

 

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/The following one-page start titled ”SYNOPSIS” was found with, but may or may not belong with, the foregoing Item./

 

SYNOPSIS

SOCIONOMY — The Science of Society — of the voluntary, the general

 and super-familial — The Free Community — organization of mankind.

 The basic rationale of free organic relationships resting upon the self-maintaining, non-coercive contractual technology of free enterprise.

 Evolution of this free technology into the now politically dominated field of public and community services by –

 The eventual, if not now impending, organization of community owners to provide public benefits and services to their properties and thereby to their inhabitants.

 Profits and values by way of recompense to their organized owners for community-wide administration of sites and resources, including protection and supervision of the community public capital.

 An organized proprietary authority taking none but voluntary revenue — making money legitimately by providing community protection and other common or public services and enhancing accordingly its proprietary (real-estate) values.

 Providing community-wide services at a profit and thereby protection against taxation and bureaucratic insol­vency. Sound public finance — not dependent on taxation.

 The functional concentration of wealth, of produc­tive property, and especially of real-estate, as capital — and thereby its high administration in the production and in the wide distribution, by voluntary exchange, both of capital wealth and of consumers’ goods and services — as the material founda­tion of popular progress, of freedom and the necessary lei­sure for cultural and spiritual advance.

DEFINITION

Socionomy: — Theory or formulation of the organic laws exemplified in the organization and development of society. — Webster’s New International Dictionary.

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