Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1187

Carbon copy of first page only of a letter from 310 Riverside Drive, New York City, to Francis I. duPont

October 4, 1936

Dear Mr. duPont:

I want to thank you for your kindly and constructive criticism. It has been my thought to help people to see what is actually taking place all the time among men as they are related together in the form of association that we know as society, rather than to lay down preconceived ideas and compel their acceptance by making proof of them. What I am trying to do is to show what the different parts of society are and how they fit into each other and what it is that prevents them from working together any better than they do. I am trying to do just as I would if I were describing a business organization. I don’t think I would try to prove anything, but I would try to point out the different groups of people associated in it and how they act in relation to each other and what kind of results they get. I think society is essentially a business organization in which the members act in two different ways towards each other: They exchange services (including commodities) with each other, and they also take from each other by force and without any voluntary exchange. We cannot look at these two types of activity without seeing that the first maintains the organization and that the second destroys it. However open the fields may be to them, it is only to the extent that government permits men to exchange services with each other, to trade, that they can make any living for themselves above that of the veriest beasts.

What I am trying to show is that nature has provided us with a form of organization in which it is not necessary to have any relations except the relation of exchange for value received at a market rate. This applies to public services as well as private. When we learn to use this method of exchange it will be because we have discontinued taxation and other forcible seizures that taxes make possible.