Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2126

Printed sheet reproducing a review of Heath’s Citadel, Market and Altar by Harry Brown, Editor, “Between the Bookends,” American Way Features, Inc., Box 3249, Los Angeles 28, California. For release November 17, 1964. Spencer MacCallum penned a notation: “This review appeared in about 200 newspapers around the country.” A second identical printing but undated carried the words, “Order this book from THE LIBERAL PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC., 5641 E. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles 22, California

Between the Bookends

THE SOCIETY OF THE FUTURE?

The American Revolution created the first real change in the structure of society in thousands of years. By limiting the state to a few delegated functions, the age-old process of limiting the people to a few delegated freedoms was overturned.

Now, 186 years later, we can view the results. The most prosperous and attractive society in the history of the world was cre­ated. And yet even that society is already suffering the governmental encroachments that plagued the others. Is there still an even better system to come?

Before he died, the late Spencer Heath viewed the progress in the natural sciences and projected many of these ideas into the sphere of societal structures. He published his conclusions in the book “Citadel, Market and Altar” (distributed by Liberal Publish­ing Co., 5641 E. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles 22, Calif.; $6.00).

After a scientific analysis of previous civili­zations, he points out that the voluntary free market has provided all societal progress and that the state, with the power of forcible taxation, has been the retarder. He concludes that the state’s expropriation, “however well intended or even necessary under the present state of knowledge, nonetheless inhibits the societal process, destroys values, and brings on widespread distress, recurrent wars and social decline.”

Heath contends that it will be the work­ings of the market that will provide the per­manent way out of a civilization of depres­sions and wars.  “The voluntary contractual

relationships of ownership of property and of services exchanged thereby on the basis of agreement and consent need only be extended into the field of community property and services.”

He sees the society of the future as one in which all services will be performed on a contractual basis, as opposed to the political and coercive. He says that the proper under­standing of the free market “will render ob­vious the profits and the advantages to all of extending this proprietary public service, con­tractually performed, into the field of public protection against official and political, as well as criminal, invasions of personal liberty and property and of the right of society to exist.”

Not a wishful thinker, the author visualizes for the reader the workings of a society that doesn’t depend upon forcible taxation to sur­vive. He outlines the mechanism by which property and lives can be protected and com­munity services can be performed. He also plots a course to take us from here to there.

Although Heath’s scientific foundations at the beginning of the book may be difficult reading for the layman, his style livens con­siderably as he moves toward the society of the future. The reader will enjoy discovering for himself a societal structure without, taxa­tion.

Spencer Heath’s fresh ideas—augmented by a foreword by columnist John Chamber­lain—make “Citadel, Market and Altar” an intellectually stimulating experience.

For Release Week of November  17,   1964 Number  203

American Way Features, Inc.

Box 3249, Los Angeles 28, California