Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1232

Carbon of a fragment of letter from Heath at Roadsend Gardens, Elkridge MD to Charles H. Ingersoll

August 9, 1938

Dear Mr. Ingersoll:

I was gratified to receive your letter of the third but am a little disappointed that some of the articles and writings that you mentioned in it have not followed. I would like very much to see your answer to A. P. Sloane Jr.; also your comment on Miss Patterson’s column and the “something else aimed at the Georgist attitude generally” that you said you would “particularly” send.

No doubt I owe you some gratitude for your efforts to elucidate my “unkown” position as an adherent to the practical program proposed first by the Physiocrats and then by Henry George who endorsed them. They were not able to find acceptance for their program, sound and practical as it was, mainly because they tried to support it upon a fallacious idea, namely that all production is that taken directly from the land and that all other industry is parasitic upon this. Henry George noted this but fell into almost the same error, for he insisted that all wealth was the product of labor applied to land. But wealth used in the course of exchange and wealth used to produce more wealth he rightly defined as capital, but we all know that nearly all wealth, as regards its value or exchangeableness, results from the application of labor to the wealth that became capital the moment it was lifted out of the land and set in the channels of exchange. Thus all wealth, except the raw products in situ of the crude extractive industries, results from the application of labor to that which was land but has now become capital and remains capital until labor has raised it to its highest value and delivered it into the hands of its (ultimate) consumers. No physical thing can be exchanged except it have value nor can it have any value beyond the value of the services incorporated in it or obtainable through it. The attempt to ascribe value to physical things apart from the services carried by them is what makes economics in general so artificial and unrealistic that practical people find very little utility in this so-called science. Business men know, or at least instinctively feel, that they are not primarily concerned with physical things but with the services that they exchange among themselves as they are measured by the consent and consensus of the market, whether they are incorporated and accumulated in physical things or not. Value is the democratic (non-coercive) measurement of services and most services are exchanged without having been previously incorporated in any physical things. This applies to all the services for which fees, salaries and wages are paid and especially to all those personal and professional services that never are embodied in any commodity form