Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1588

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Leonard E. Read, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

January 7, 1957

Dear Mr. Read:

     I was happy to have your note of December 27th, and to know that you found pleasure in Sam Walter Foss’ Dreams in Homespun much the same as I have done for a good many years.

     Of course Foss got off on the wrong foot in his use of the term “ownership,” but that was only because he was a poet and did not get off on any feet at all — only on the wings of song. And like most of our philo­sophers, he uses “ownership” just as they use “values” — in a metaphorical or metaphysical sense. So do our economists in very large part; for they, too, try to impute subjective properties to objective things, and often do not realize that, in the functioning of the market, the value of anything, as a fact, is simply what it actually brings in exchange, and not what somebody thought or felt about it in himself subjectively as a possibility. Adam Smith got this straight when he was consciously thinking about it, but was not able to hold to it all the way through.

     I feel quite certain that it is because we trans­fer our feelings to things, trying to invest them with qualities which they in and of themselves do not possess, that we labor under so much confusion and are often so very disputatious about such terms as “ownership” and “value.”

     My own approach to such matters is quite inductive and objective, as you will see by the marked portion of the enclosed galley proof taken from the Appendix, “On the Meanings of Terms,” attached to my soon-to-be-pub­lished volume, Citadel, Market and Altar.

     Your kind good wishes for the New Year are cordially returned.

Sincerely,