Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1586

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Tolley Hartwick, 901 Alice Street, Miles City, Montana.

January 27, 1956

Dear Mr. Hartwick:

     I have just returned to New York, where I find your letter of January 15th and its various enclosures. It is good to know that a man like you is giving serious attention to fundamental aspects of our public affairs and indicating eventual solutions. I am one of that same company. I am about to publish a book of less than 400 pages which examines the system of voluntary relationships as contrasted with the system of coercion which, as you know, is fundamental to all political government.

     There are just two ways in which large numbers of people can be organized. There is the ancient coercive and political, and there is the modern contractual and social which has been growing up in the world during the last few hundred years.

     Civilization advances not through any policies or performances of governments but through the extension of contractual relationships far and wide and into new fields. All administration of sites and resources, even agriculture, was until recent centuries administered by the political powers. Only in the 19th Century and in the Western world were agriculture and the other extractive industries in large part relieved of the iron hand of political administration. That is how so much wealth and value was created during the 19th Century.

     It is only through non-political ownership that any property, natural or artificial, can be administered other than politically. Free enterprise is enterprise in which the parties are related contractually, neither exercising coercive power over the other. In this relationship, there must be private ownership of whatever property is the subject matter of contract. The moment the ownership is political, the administration ceases to be contractual.

     There are only two general rules, the iron rule practiced by governments and the golden rule practiced by men in their contractual engagements one with another. The golden rule is the divine command to engage in con­tractual relationships — relationships in which each party does unto the other in the same manner (non-coercively) as he would have the other do unto him. There is no other rule in the contractual relationship. It is the only rule in any legitimate business. Any departure from it is departure from business and going into the realm of force, which, wherever it is systematized, is called political administration — and no longer regarded as robbery or piracy.

     I would suggest you do some careful re-thinking of your proposition that the owners of the earth and its bounties be displaced by government, and those who must live upon them be subjected again to political adminis­tration as in the ancient and in the modern totalitarian world.

     Please let me thank you for your many courtesies and opportunity of examining your writings, which I return herewith.

Very sincerely yours,

SH/m

I enclose some writings of my own in opposition to government administration of land, which were quite possibly not included among all the published theories with which you are well acquainted.

Enc:  “The Trojan Horse of ‘Land Reform’”

“Shorter Criticism of the Economic Argument of H. G.”

“Private Property in Land Explained”

“How Come We Finance World Communism?”

“Progress & Poverty Reviewed,” with Supplementary Disc.