Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1787

Dictation notes to MacCallum for a letter to William Schlamm.

No date

Dear Willie Schlamm:

     Your friend, F.C., and you have done, each of you, a top flight job. And it is a draw. You have dramatized brilliantly, so far as either of you goes, your respective rationalizations erected under the shadow of an undisputed menace on the basis of a common thralldom to dread and fear where there is none but the animal chance of fight or flight — expansionism or isolationism, preparations for attack or for defense. True rationality, free and (creative) intellect, is in no way involved. Both rationalizations are fallacious. And this is how:

     From the whole world-situation, they take but a single premise, and that a negative — that there are in the world more or less transitory powers and processes inimical to freedom and thus destructive of life. No account is taken of the positive powers and processes, the creative relationships among men upon which alone the negative and destructive can subsist.

     The political powers are truly premised as being mutually inimical and that the more one of them proceeds or purposes against another, the more it will destroy the creative organization on which it subsists. All this and nothing more is premised by the contending sides. Thus political and thereby destructive measures alone can be considered and the issue is: How shall our own destructive system act towards another that we more greatly fear? The expansionist says prepare for the eventuality of war both at home and abroad. The isolationist says build up war preparedness chiefly or exclusively at home. There is no real difference, only a matter of detail. In either case, eventually, we go down the totalitarian drain.

     That is, unless there is a social, a non-political alternative. And there is, although it is not immediately available and must be grown into — either empirically and through bitter experiences, or through understanding it rationally in the same manner that men have come to understand the organization of the physical world and, thereby, make creative use of it.

     In the non-political world, men have private property so that they can make contracts and thereby do unto others in the same manner they would have others do unto them. We call this free enterprise because it is a relationship in which both parties are free from dominance by or subservience to the other. This free enterprise under the Golden Rule is what has brought into the world during the last century or two the unprecedented abundance of food and other material things that has doubled the average life span and made possible a higher and wider civilization than was ever dreamed. It has done this while at the same time providing everything that government has consumed in carrying out its domestic restrictions and regulations and its foreign wars. It is the modern miracle of creation, and it is moving, silently and unknown, in the direction of a like proprietary and contractual administration not only of individual services and goods but also those goods and services which must be enjoyed in common — community services.

     These community services and community properties are now for the most part under political administration through municipal corporations who do not own the community property — the public capital — over which they exercise control. This is a carry-over from the Roman and even more ancient totalitarian slave states. It continues only because free enterprise is as yet so little extended into the public field. When the nature of free enterprise is better understood, it will extend itself, under the profit motivation, into the public field. The owners of community sites and resources will unite their properties in corporate form for the production and distribution of those services over which politicians now preside. They will convert their separate titles into undivided interests in the whole and thereby supply protection and other common services to their properties and thereby to the individuals and organizations who inhabit them and who will pay through the contractual process of free enterprise the market value of the advantages so obtained and enjoyed, thus eliminating the system of taxation and coercion that strangles free enterprise and redeeming the public capital from its present bankruptcy into a solvency and earning capacity       enriching them in their separate enterprises and driving up the demand for sites.