Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1231

Carbon of letter from Heath to Francis I. duPont, One Wall Street, New York City

December 8, 1938

 

 

 

 

Dear Mr. duPont:

Thanks for your kind acknowledgement and forthright comment on the form of what I have written.

     I have tried to express my observations of what are the basic essentials in the conduct of all business and to the maintenance of any social organization — how sound business principles are as applicable to the community business, to the administration of public capital by the owners who receive the income from it, as they are to any other business — and how the public business, when so conducted, is bound to be larger and far more profitable to its owners and administrators than any other business in the world.

    Incidentally, government, which is now based on force and compulsion and is therefore anti-social, will become based on voluntary exchange, like the sale of community services to the occupants of a hotel or the supplying of services in any other sound and proper business.

    When, notwithstanding improprieties of form, you have been indulgent enough to go on and reflect upon the ideas themselves, I shall be much interested in your reaction to them. It is seldom that originators are also good expositors, but sound ideas are always at a premium with those who can utilize them, despite literary handicaps. And, anyhow, hardly any of the conceptions of nature on which modern science and civilization are based are understood by more than those very few persons who have the necessary theoretical grasp for putting them into practical effect. Every business is somebody’s business, not everybody’s, and the basic principles underlying any service or business are not understood, nor need they be understood, except by those who are engaged in it.

     It has seemed to me that a person of your reflective mentality and of your background in the administration of capital in private enterprises for the benefit of a wide public might find some delight in the discovery that these same methods are no less applicable to, and certainly not less profitable in, the supplying of community services through owner-administration of the public capital.

     Again appreciating your interest, I am

Sincerely,

Spencer Heath.