Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1553                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Carbon of a letter from Heath to Charles P. Phillips, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

July 25, 1955

Dear Dr. Phillips:

    I have been very much thrilled at reading your article,

“We All Believe in Competition, But — ” in Reader’s Digest. It is refreshing to have good sense and the in­terest of everybody set out in such interesting and enter­taining form.

     I hope you did not mean to say, on page 49, that there ever is such a thing as unfair competition. It is fine to think of “competition” literally — “begging together” asking Mr. John Q. Public to accept their serv­ices or their sales. Lying and appeal to force is always dishonest and unfair, but it is not competition. It is what people resort to escape or destroy competition, and is nowhere so extensive as where competition does not freely prevail.

     The most essential competition as I view it, is compe­tition between land-owners for tenants or purchasers. If ever or when this is eliminated, and our sites and our resources are distributed by bureaucratic authority with­out competition, then we won’t have to worry about com­munism or about anything else. Our very lives will be in the communist bag.

     I am sending you a small contribution of my own on this subject entitled, “The Trojan Horse of Land Reform.” If it interests you to read this analysis of the land-socialist argument as it is accepted by so many religious-minded people, may I send you with my further compliments a thorough-going, rational analysis of the land-socialist argument as so persuasively and yet fallaciously set forth by Henry George?

Sincerely yours,

SH/m

Enc:  “Trojan Horse of Land Reform”