Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1140

Penciling in a Ring-Master Note Book

1939?

 

White envelope has items 1140-1141 & 1148

 

 

 

All wealth, and all benefits, are created by labor of body and brain. But no wealth or activity, however useful or useless it may be to its creator, has any social character and significance or value, but only individual utility, unless it be redistributed by exchange. The exchange process and activity is all that gives commodities and services any social significance. The exchange relationship is called value. Value is the exchange relationship between things as shown by their positions on a price scale. Redistribution by exchange, by sales for value received, is the only just and equitable redistribution.

     Private property in land is the social instrument whereby publicly created benefits come to have sales values and thus to be distributed justly for value received. Ground rent is the market value and price paid for all publicly created benefits that are distributed justly without favor or privilege. All other allocations of public benefits are privileges obtained without giving value in exchange and therefore beneficial to some only to the detriment of others.

     Land ownership with the renting of sites and locations affords the only market there is in which publicly created benefits can be distributed justly for value received and at rates socially and not arbitrarily set and determined. All public benefits allocated otherwise and not in accordance with value received are beneficial to some only by being detrimental to others. No social values can thus arise.

     The value of land as expressed in net rent actually received is the only value that results from public and governmental operations. The only social values resulting from government are those that manifest themselves in the value of the sites and locations, the territory served by it.

     Changes in the form, quantity or scope of governmental action are socially beneficial only as they lift the limitations on the use and demand for land and thus raise rental values.

     Land administration, landlord-ism, by merchandising publicly created benefits, transforms them from special and private privileges into social and public values justly apportioned