Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1091

Dear Sir:

I wish at this time to offer you my sincere thanks for the very great service you have been to your State and to our country in resisting the destructive demagoguery of the “New Deal” and doing so much to preserve the foundations of our free government and civilized society. I am thankful that you have the historical sense to understand the significance of the whole movement to concentrate autocratic authority in a single man or his subservient group and the political fortitude to stand aloof from the false humanitarianism with which the ambitious politician always cloaks his lust for unbridled power.

The present underhanded attempt to stuff the Courts, superior and inferior, with “the King’s creatures” and to designate special judges for the trial of particular causes is too reminiscent of the Courts of King’s Bench and Star Chamber and the Bloody Assizes to be thought of without shuddering, while the movement to take over all control of budgetary expenditures and the prosecution and persecution of “tax evaders” would set the stage for another Charles.

What gives men any life and subsistence above the beasts is the amount of free business they manage to carry on despite political pressure and regulation. It is only by the voluntary exchange and distribution of a variety of specialized services upon terms determined in open markets that men can have any employment to create the civilized values out of which to pay each other. All the evils and imbalances of our business economy comes of political pressure and repression that creates special privileges and monopolies and destroys the essential and unconscious democracy of the market-place — the place where men assemble and vote their wishes and desires and thus establish democratically the terms upon which they redistribute among themselves their goods and services or other properties, without any force, violence or arbitrary decree. It is the proper office of government to preserve the democratic freedom of the exchanges, not to destroy it by its arbitrary invasions. Government is the only undemocratic, unsocialized force in civilized society. It is the only service that is not based upon the principle of measured exchanges for its services, the only business that still continues to be conducted on “the good old plan, that he shall take who has the power and he may keep who can.” What is needed is not more and more desocialization of the democratic processes of exchange by the coercions of government, but rather the socialization and democratization of government from an instrument of coercion by seizure into an agency of service by exchange. There can be no real and permanent prosperity or any social security at any level of society until business tames government into the technique of service and exchange in place of force and seizure. This change will sound Utopian no longer than we neglect to examine the structure and normal functions of our system of democratic exchanges of services and discover the relationship of rent and proprietorship in land to the public services. When this is understood (as it easily may be) the enormous profits and values accruing to every interest involved will insure the automatic socialization of the public services by their gradual adoption into the general system of democratic exchange.

It took men ages to discover the advantages of trading above seizing; how trading increased their wealth and subsistence while seizing diminished and destroyed it. It has taken ages of political repression of trade, under alternating absolutist and ‘democratic’ forms, for men to learn how governments can confer their public services by the democratic technique of measured exchanges and thus derive their revenues from sales instead of seizures.

The wisest of the ancients could not conceive of society without slavery. So, the moderns must learn to conceive of society without seizure, of government without taxation. If this seems Utopian, as did a society without slavery, we must remember that tribute and taxation, the seizure of property by political authority under whatever forms, has bankrupted every government and destroyed every social organization of the past and now gravely menaces the stability of every society in the Western World.

So long as government employs no technique but force, immediate or ultimate, and enjoys no revenue but from seizures and arbitrary charges, it is already essentially communistic and becomes completely so as taxation moves onward to an ultimate 100 per cent and control of all property passes to the dominant authority. But before that consummation, the basis of taxation will have been destroyed, there will be no capital to administer, and we will have reverted to the original barbaric communism from which society emerged.

The socialization of public services, as we socialize the services of food and clothing by the technique of the market, is the only escape from social dissolution and the only final answer to communism and all the other schemes for the governmentalization of society.

The nation is not without hope while there are in public life a few men who see clearly and feel strongly what is necessarily implied in the extension of governmental power and the breaking down of all constitutional barriers against its crudest and most vicious exercise.