Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1491

Letter to W.C. Mullendore, President, Southern California Edison Co., P.0. Box 351, Los Angeles 53, California

October 6, 1953

 

 

Dear Mr. Mullendore:

 

     As upon many past occasions I have been greatly encouraged by your latest message to your stockholders in its bearing on our national policies versus economic welfare. Statesmanship is almost as rare among business people as it is among politicians. You are a highly praiseworthy exception.

     Since my retirement from active business and as a chiefly aeronautical research engineer about 1932, I have with much satisfaction engaged in the same kind of research upon our voluntary society (as distinguished from coercive government) employing the same objective methods that have been so fruitful of understanding in the physical and natural world.

     For the most part I have directed my attention to the operative side of society instead of the pathological, to the manner of its functioning rather than to the manner of its becoming defunct. In this I have made what are to me very rewarding and inspiring discoveries (for instance how the free market not only distributes the values created therein over the whole membership but likewise distributes the evils, such as its losses to government, in a similar way).

     However I find that for people of middle age and up­wards there is a large incrustation of false and contradictory ideas, pedigreed by tradition and carefully nourished by academic repetition. Some of my more recent writing has taken less the form of report on the operational processes of society and more of criticism of the fundamental wrong premises from which the main dogmas of political collect­ivism have historically been derived. I refer in part­icular to the false premises of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, upon which the main dogmas of the land communist creed hang.

     In this connection it may interest you to see my thorough-going refutation of the economic argument for Land Communism as it was so skillfully highlighted by Henry George some fifty years ago. I think this review and supplemental material attached is the first clear exposé of the land communist dialectic so widely and deceptively publicized by his popular work.

     As a matter of current interest in addition to the above critical review, I have enclosed an article referring to some recent discussion of the Henry George theory in the columns of the Freeman Magazine. I hope you have seen some of my advertisements as they have been appearing in the Freeman and in Barron’s Weekly and will shortly begin to appear in the Financial World, as per recent proofs which I enclose.

     Again complimenting you on your own valuable activities I am,

Sincerely yours,

SH:sm Enc.