Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1147

1934?

Dear Mr. Geiger:

When great ideas or discoveries are set out plainly to the world, it is seldom that their sponsors have seen their full significance or even dreamed of their more remote implications. The history of epoch-making ideas has been of their enunciation, wide acceptance (with over-beliefs attached) and their final absorption in a wider synthesis.

     The Single Tax of Henry George may be expected to come under this rule. By linking it with the general principle of organic development, social-ized rent employed for public purposes may be seen as a seed value withdrawn annually from the sum total of social creation. It is planted (or invested) in the general service department of society (government) and cultivated (or administered) by husbandmen who are public servants engaged in the cultivation and production of public values which manifest themselves in rent or additional land values according to the yield or productiveness of the social enterprise.

     Now if the husbandmen are without proprietorship and work only for hire, it will be necessary for them to take for their services (by taxation or otherwise) at least a portion, if not all of the yield. But so far as they become proprietors, the fruits of their services are theirs immediately without need for collection and repayment to them. As proprietors their contributions of rent would become not taxes but investments and the social yield upon their investments (realized as rent) would be the compensation for their services (wages) of management and administration including the return (interest) upon their investments. The advantage to society and the general public of proprietorship above the hire system for rewarding public servants lies in the fusing of their private interest as proprietors with the advancement of the public interest through the supplying of public services at lowest cost in the abundance which an emancipated private industry would demand.

     I have tried to set out this general idea in the paper which I am enclosing in the hope that it may arrest your attention and stimulate your already great interest in land value taxation as a wholly creative project.