Spencer Heath Archive

Item 610

Penciling on two notebook pages

No date

The principle involved in the social versus govern­mental distribution of sites and resources — administration of land — is simple indeed. We need only to remember that political persons or organizations have no revenue but that taken, directly or indirectly, by force, and that the modern society has so far evolved that proprietary persons or organizations (whether of lands or other property) are no longer political and coercive and that they receive automatically through the free contractual process only such recompense as the democracy of the market in the open forums of exchange awards as the equivalent of the services performed. Here is an equable process in the social organ­ization of men in all respects comparable to the balanced biological processes that sustain the organization of the individual man.

In all her integrations of lesser units into higher organizational forms, nature teaches the units to move out of disintegrative relationships of collision and coercion by coming into the enduring relationships of balanced har­mony in reciprocal exchange.

/The first paragraph, above, replaced the following first version:/

The principle involved is very simple: the sites and resources of a community, other than the public ones, must be allocated to individual possession. This service of distribution must be performed by or under some authority, political and coercive or proprietary and social. The one acts upon society through government, be it limited or unlimited, benevolent or tyrannical. Its only instrument is force. The other is operated by society itself, crudely or elaborately, according as the society has evolved. Shall this service be performed by political persons popularly elected or otherwise invested with powers of coercion over other persons and their properties or shall the sources of life be distributed through the democracy of the market by proprietary persons whose recognized titles invest them specifically with exclusively a contractual jurisdiction or authority over their properties, without any authority, coercive or otherwise, over any other person or property.

We need only to remember that political persons or organizations have no revenue but that taken directly or indirectly by force, and to discover that proprietary persons or organizations (whether of land or other property) receive automatically through the market only the recompense that the forums of exchange determine democratically to be the social equivalent of the services performed. Here we come to an equable process of nature in the social organization of men in all respects comparable to the biological processes that sustain the individual and all the humbler orders of life.