Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1418

Carbon of a letter from Heath at 102 West 85th Street, New York City, to C.R. Walker, 127 North Dearborn Street, Chicago, Illinois

February 5, 1943

 

Editor, Cause and Effect

Dear Mr. Walker:

     I hope you have not attributed my long silence to anything but preoccupation with writing etc. since I last wrote to you and since you so kindly sent me a copy of Mr. Emil Jorgensen’s book, Behold the Future, which was something like a year ago now. I have an unfortunate tendency to put important things off until I think I can do them properly, and that has been the case with writing to you and thanking you and making some comment and criti­cism which I think you suggested that I should do at that time.

     I read this book with great interest but feeling some­what at a loss what to say about it, for there is so much more in the whole economic picture than the book takes any account of — that it, in fact, wholly disregards. Moreover, its thinking, from the outset, is wholly chained to the fixed idea that free trade in land is coercive instead of voluntary and that rent is taken somehow by a force that is even more insidious and destructive than the taxation that dries up its source, instead of being the automatic payment made by a community for the blessings of a contractual (as opposed to a tyrannical) distribution of its sites and resources.

     On the narrow premises that it takes, I could not adversely criticize the book, so I did not want to try to do until better and far broader premises could be sup­plied. So I reflected upon its diagram that shows (as I recollect) a great rise in rent through the decades without correlating it with production or national income or, negatively, with the taxation that holds them both down.

     I tried to make a new and more inclusive diagram, and this turned out to be quite an undertaking. It devel­oped, however, and its explanation became in time the additional chapter (26) of my book, together with other specimen pages, including a glossary of terms, that I am sending you herewith. I hope you will find this chapter and the chart accompanying it an aid to your generally clear thinking about these matters and that you will find it convenient in the not too distant future to let me hear from you regarding it, for it is not a matter to be either accepted casually or dismissed lightly as some are disposed to do. I hope you will also give your thought­ful consideration to the terms and the explanations of them as given in the glossary, especially those definitions that are so much more comprehensive and in some cases contradictory to those generally used. You will notice that my definitions are not based on theory or tradition but upon observation of the practical circumstances or events to which in the conduct of practical business these terms are almost invariably tied — I refer to such terms as rent, wages, interest, price, profits, etc. Also you will see that in the case of many of the terms I have tried to bring out into the open what many or most people imply when they use the words, vaguely sensing or wishing what they do not consciously understand. This, of course, applies to the more general terms, such as Society, government, democracy, property, administration, socialization, capital (both private and public), contract, value, civilization.

     Please let me tell you, in all truth, that I have thought of you and Mrs. Walker and many of your other most genial associates many, many times and most pleasantly during the long separation from you and the rather diminishing pro­spect of being able to see you soon again. However, I am leaving here next Monday for a brief visit in Western North Carolina (at a college there as their guest) and I am thinking rather seriously of going due north from there when I leave and paying a visit to my daughter and family in Michigan. So I may be much nearer to you soon and there is some possibility that I could come to Chicago again. I would surely enjoy seeing you, and all of you, again. (I almost said y’all; it’s the North Carolina influence.)

     I am enclosing herewith in stamps the same amount of first-class postage that it takes to send all this material to you so that when you finish with it, which I hope will not be too soon, you can conveniently mail it back to me or preferably, let me tell you where and to whom I would like to have it sent.

     With best wishes and very high regards, I am,

Sincerely,