Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1228

Carbon of letter from Heath to Hon. Lawson Purdy, c/o Schalkenbach Foundation, 11 Park Place, New York City

October 23, 1937

Dear Mr. Purdy;

 

      I trust you remember me from my having talked with you some two years ago when Gladwin Bouton and I were about to revive the Eastern States Taxpayers’ League and place some constructive ideas about taxation before the substantial business and real estate interests.

 

      I recall that you took an interest in our project and I am also advised by Miss Colbron and others that you have done much independent thinking in this field and should be preeminently able to evaluate any fresh contribution on the subject of taxation and the important relation between ground rent and public administration.

 

      Accordingly, I am sending you copy of an extended communication with Adam Schantz some two years ago and also an article more recently prepared and much more explicit along the same lines.

 

      I ask you to read these carefully and give them your leisurely reflection. I do not ask anyone to accept any of the broad conceptions I am trying to present as to public administration being the true function of land ownership in the natural and necessary order of things but only that they be thoughtfully considered.

      The entire governmental organization of Saxon England seems to have been based on this principle and it is found at the root of the early feudal organization on the continent before it became brutalized by the Roman technique of tribute and taxation for public pur­poses in lieu of rent voluntarily paid for public value received. The germ of the idea is also found in various writings but it seems never to have been developed. During some four or five years’ reading and research, about the nearest approach to its expression I find in Fillebrown’s A B C of Taxation, page 19, where he says:

“Besides being the natural housers and the natural tax gatherers, the landlords are the natural asses­sors. With this triple responsibility and privi­lege landlords ought to be, as, if they paid all the taxes they would be, the natural guardians of the public treasury against wastefulness and mis­appropriation for the simple reason that ground rent, while increased by every wise outlay, is de­creased by every unwise expenditure.”

      I think that in this quoted passage Mr. Fillebrown was coming close to some truths and relationships of tremendous importance looking to the possibility of all government and public services being performed under the supervision of and at the proper cost and expense of those persons whose position in the structure of society makes them the only possible purveyors of public services on the basis of value received, as other services are purveyed.

I hope you will find in what I have written along this line something to warrant your investigation and discussion from several other and much broader points of view than the mere pecuniary interest of the land-owning proprietors.

Very truly yours,

          

           Spencer Heath