Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1192

Carbon of letter from 434 West 120th, New York City, to Mr. Charles G. Baldwin, Munsey Bldg., Baltimore, Maryland

March 15, 1937

Dear Charles:

I want to thank you a whole lot for arranging opportunity for me to present to your Greek Letter Society and to classes at Goucher and Johns Hopkins some of the broad and universal implications that I find in the philosophy of Henry George. It was a great delight to me to do this and to feel that considerable interest was aroused in all three places. After forty years’ wandering in the wilderness of uninspired negation of property in land it is time that this burden be cast off and the Georgean philosophy stand forth in its positive and creative aspects acceptable to all men.

Some time ago, at the instance of Mr. C. L. Kendal, I wrote out answers to several questions that he propounded from the conventional single tax point of view. I am sending you a copy of these questions and my answers to them, hoping that the matter will be of interest to you. What I have tried to say in answer to Question Number One is that when rent is paid, a rendre, it is the measure of the services for which it is paid, but when rent is taken, a prender, by taxation, it is no longer rent for it is not exchange, and it is not the measure of anything but the brute power of the political officers who take it. This abolishes the democracy of the market and substitutes arbitrary power. The payment of rent at the market rate is the only democracy we have in connection with public services, either in obtaining them or in paying for them. Outside of the rent market public services are conferred arbitrarily with favoritism and caprice and payment for them is collected in the same manner. The services paid for in the rent market are the only net public services we have. When this market is destroyed by substituting seizure there can be no net public services left and therefore no security of possession or of anything else and no public or private values. But to abolish all taxation would so increase public service and security as to raise rents vastly more than all the taxes abolished and at the same time leave no means for supporting the public services except the vastly increased rent then being paid for them.

You will note that I answer Questions Two and Three in the opposite manner from what is customary among single taxers.

I have partly re-written my fundamental epistle to the real property interests and organizations and I hope to finish it and send you a copy before long.

Best of all regards and wishes,