Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1507

Letter to Royal D. Rood, 4501 Cicotte Street, Detroit 10, Michigan

February 6, 1954

 

Dear Mr. Rood:

     I have read yours of November 10th and other com­munications with exceeding interest and I do admire your energy, your pluck and your pertinacity against great odds. For some time I have been wondering how I should answer your several questions:

     I do not think Henry George made Ricardo’s writings in general the basis of his argument against property in land, but there can be no doubt that he made Ricardo’s so-called law of rent, as extended by him to include town and city in addition to rented agricultural lands, the very core of his central argument concluded on page 357. In this he clearly stands or falls with Ricardo.

     I must assure you that I have no “plan” to equalize livelihoods or anything else. My only plan is to under­stand those processes and relationships among men whereby their freedom is maintained, their lives lifted and extended and their civilizations advanced. For it is only through understanding what God or Nature is already doing for us that we can make full avail of it.

     Land owners holding title are the only persons in a community who can allocate its sites and resources by the free contractual process without political favoritism or discrimination. I look forward to their organizing as other owners do, especially hotel owners – who organize for the service of their hotel-communities – for the service of their whole communities, beyond mere distribu­tion, and thus obtaining more rent in payment for them. This is the social alternative to political distribution. The doings of the politicians in China including the killing of two millions of landlords is a good lesson in what is to be expected from political instead of social administration of sites and resources.

     On point #2 I am afraid I can not tell you how the ancient fertility festivals and virgin myths had anything to do with the supposition that mere quantity of popula­tion causes or increases the rent of land.

     On point #3 I don’t think landlords’ services of any kind or degree could sell for much rent in any remote place, or even in a populous place, where capital and labor can not freely produce or are discouraged by taxation from doing so. A tax-enslaved population, however dense, can not purchase much of anything, least of all high grade public services by landlords or by anyone else.

     On point #5, there is no reason why landlords, being paid only what the process of the community market assigns to them, for their distributive services, should hand any of it back to anyone. They had much better invest a part of it in some protective services to their tenants, such as getting their tenants’ tax burden reduced in the matter of unnecessary taxation or the like, and in that way get a lot more rent in recompense for such further services.

     The owner of any property becomes, in effect, the trustee over it for the benefit of whomever he sells the use or occupancy of it to, to whom he thereby distributes it. An owner of any property does not administer it by giving it away or the income from it away. He only dis­tributes the use or occupancy of it and gets rent or pro­fit from it in proportion as the users find benefits or advantages in the use of it. It is up to him to see that his property affords to its tenants or users the greatest amount of positive advantage and the greatest exemption from evil (such as taxation or other violence) that he singly or collectively with other owners can provide.

     The difference between rent and taxes is that rent is limited, by competition between owners, to what the market awards for the services performed. Taxes are not limited by anything but the power of the king or other politicians to take and the inability of the victim to pay. I think you did nobly well in your reply to the man (many of them) who thought as to rent and taxes that it was all the same.

     However, I might point out to you that when society evolves to the point where community landlords organize themselves in some corporate or similar form, as they do in a hotel or the like, they will no more allow politicians to tax their inhabitants than they would invite robbers and racketeers into their hotel. Nor will they think of such a thing as themselves laying taxes on their tenants and thus either driving them away or making them too poor to pay rent.

     I am indeed sorry you had to give up your work at Great Lakes. I do wish I could personally aid or coope­rate with you in some way.

SH:sm                            Sincerely,