Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2231

Citadel, Market and Altar, Chapters 17-19, with some slight revisions of punctuation

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 17

The Order of Societal Evolution

Everything ideal has a natural basis, and everything natural has an ideal development.    —Santayana.

The order of development of the public authority in a community, from the tribal or familial through various forms of consensual and of political organization towards the fully developed societal organi­zation and mode of operation — by extension of the contract process and relationship, based on individual ownership and voluntary ex­change, into the field of public and community services as well as private services — seems, in the main, to be:

1.    TRIBAL AND FAMILIAL GROUPS

— without settled communities — which gradually cease wandering and become

2.    PRIMITIVE VILLAGE COMMUNITIES

— strongly blood-bonded and custom-bound communities, instinc­tive, like insect colonies, with but little sense of individual personality or separate property — tending to develop out of patriarchy into

3.    EARLY VOLUNTARY FEUDALISM

— mutual obligations of land lords and free men, protection and services by proprietors without serfdom or servitude — that, through forced labor, especially in warm, flat and fertile lands, lapses into

4. PREDATORY SLAVE STATES

— military despotisms under monarchy, aristocracy or a democratic elite — or, in more rugged lands, gives way to

5. SERVILE FEUDALISM

— monarchy with local community autonomy by barons over serfs or slaves — which, by political and despotic power, the taxing authority, passing from kings and political land owners to transiently elected authorities without the responsibility of community owner­ship, gives way, in the Western world, to the modern

6. PREDATORY POLITICAL STATES

— nationalistic organizations exercising a supposedly limited taxing power and thereby increasingly assuming unlimited powers — des­tined always to fall, until they are redeemed from their political character and become

7. PROPRIETARY COMMUNITY-SERVICE AUTHORITIES

— community services by the community owners organized as such, with no taxation or other coercion beyond necessary policing against offenders — creating community value and community income offered in return for occupancy and enjoyment of community facilities and services, including, primarily, security against compulsions, either public or private, and finally associating in a

8. WORLD ASSOCIATION OF PROPRIETARY
 COMMUNITY-SERVICE AUTHORITIES

— inaugurating and executing international projects and agreements of mutual and world-wide interest and utility and creating and main­taining common, world facilities in aid of unrestricted freedom of intercourse and exchange.

 Organization is always numerical. It is an assemblage of whole units or integral parts so acting with respect to one another that a new organic unit is created, a higher synthesis effected, a new type or species evolved. When the units or parts are most similar and least differentiated, that is when the newly integrated unit is at the least development of its potential powers.

 

 The most primitive association of men is based, doubtless, on like­ness rather than unlikeness. Kinship, likeness of blood and birth, is the earliest bond. Mutual amenities and satisfactions spring from like behavior instinctively within the blood-bonded group. There is little if any feeling of self as separate, independent or unique. Custom and conformity is automatic in ways that, by and large, favor sur­vival of the group. Lacking productive arts or crafts, subsistence is by appropriation. Hence, tribal nomadism marks the earliest asso­ciative groups. Its units are custom bound and but little differentiated, behavior is uniform, solidarity strong and conflict seldom among the members of the group.

 

 Merely familial and tribal associations are, in principle, the same as those of the animal and the insect world. They subsist on the spontaneous gifts of nature alone, and these they do not create but only consume and destroy. When nature is generous and her rigors mild, they live longer lives and their numbers increase; but when numbers outrun subsistence, the condition is reversed. Their need makes them inimical to all outside their own familial bonds. Con­flict and harsh conditions shorten their lives, and they are preserved only by flight to greener pastures or by the greater reproductivity that their higher mortality entails.

 

 Instinctively, headship in the primitive association appears early if not immediately as an element of organization, the first step of differentiation within the group whereby to coordinate the activities of food gathering and the like and the performing of ceremonials deemed essential to the tribal welfare. There is a second activity, protective and defensive, which includes the combative. As scarcity prompts wandering, so it inspires jealousies and fears among mutually alien groups. This different kind of feeling directs a different kind of behavior towards alien members and groups, all the more hostile because of the intense solidarity of each with his own. Thus arises a need for temporary war leaders or chiefs. And out of the general need for headship comes gradually a permanent patriarchal authority in the group. The higher security brought about by this differentiation of authority is accompanied by improvement in the arts and crafts, and the crude productivity thus achieved gives in many places more permanent abode. Agricultural village communities arise wide­spread in many regions, extending with but little change over long periods of time.

 

 In the village community the bond is kinship, the organization sedentary, land and most possessions are the common property of the group and a non-aggressive patriarchy tends to prevail. This earliest and widespread form of community life has an extensive literature.[1] Its chief feature concerns the manner of allocating the use of the community land, no part of which can be alienated from the group by any member. Distribution is made according to common consent in the village moot presided over by a patriarch or elder to whom the distributive function is allowed and by whose authority allocations and re-allocations are confirmed under the force or sanc­tion of custom or common law. The patriarch presides over com­munity affairs much as a modern trustee, or as a chairman, under the custom of parliamentary law, determines and carries out the will of the group.

 

 The most primitive village community unit lacks the organiza­tional structure essential for effective or sustained defense. Increasing need of protection prompts its members to accept the authority of him who is foremost and ablest to protect and defend their respective occupancies. The community authority, primarily patriarchal, comes to be relied upon not only to allocate the land according to the spontaneous will of the group but also to defend the allocations so made. The security of what the old deeds guarantee as “quiet possession” to particular occupants as tenants or freeholders is thus assured. And in recompense for such security, allegiance is given and rent service paid. The relationship of the patriarch to the members of his own community tends to become proprietary and thereby contractual, instead of political and thereby coercive — even though he be defensive or even hostile towards the members of other tribes or groups. The early proprietor carries out the determinations of the public moot just as the free market is the land owner’s monitor today. He receives his administrative revenues from the inhabitants by the custom of contract, according to their freehold allotments over which he presides. In this manner, the blood-bond allegiance to the tribal patriarch or chief is gradually transformed into the societal bond. Contract supersedes consanguinity, and at its foundation dis­tinguishes the societal community from all preceding forms. Thus out of tribal and village life, early voluntary feudalism, as the authentic social advance, begins.

 

 The patriarchal proprietors of communities occupied by kindred tribal groups unite in counsel and agreement as common needs arise. When wandering or invading tribes menace the security of their communities, they concentrate their protective function in one of themselves as war leader, koenig or primitive king — much as King Alfred’s fellow proprietors united their defensive function in him to resist the Danes. A like regional expansion of the ceremonial function doubtless takes place, as represented in later times by priestly hier­archy and oracles, leaving only the local protective, distributive and ceremonial functions to the proprietary authorities in the village groups.

 

 The tendency in the primitive village community is towards contract — towards evolving early proprietary communities. But seldom in the record of history has this development of free community ad­ministration shown more than its earliest beginnings. Except in Saxon England, where it took firm hold, early voluntary feudalism may be only a short-lived intermediary between the primitive village community and the predatory slave state that in ancient times reached its political culmination in the world dominion of Imperial Rome.

 

 The contractual association of men is the basic free community pattern, impersonal and thereby capable of becoming universal, transcending the narrow bonds of common kinship or descent.

 Nowhere in ancient times did the normal development of society pass beyond the stage of the primitive free community. Invariably was it arrested, overwhelmed by a contrary mode of organization based upon force and itself invariably doomed to defeat. This was not due to any vice inherent in the normal pattern. Normality does not beget abnormality. The primitive free communities either fell to conquest or were themselves corrupted under stress of unfavor­able pressures and influences alien to them.

 

 Lacking the structure for effective or sustained defense, the primi­tive village fell easy prey to the depredations of those tribal groups who continued their nomadic ways. In easy-living lands, where the rigors of a political administration over the primitive productivity can best be survived, aggression by raiding became conquest and the permanent subjugation of populations. The predatory slave state was born. Authority tended to center in war leaders who became conquerors and kings. These were neither patriarchs nor were they proprietors; they were predators. Their administration was political, maintained by force, not sanctioned by native custom, contract or consent. They were the first progenitors of the ancient predatory slave states and of all the political sovereignties, whether autocratic or popular, of the modern world.

 

 These political states, organized systems of force, became a greater menace to the early settled communities than the maraudings of nomad tribes. Village communities are primitive but self-sustaining and sound. Yet through whole ages of history nomad armies and predatory slave states despoiled and destroyed them, even into modern times, where the barbarian’s love of freedom still survived. The political history of all ancient times is but little else than the clashing and consolidation of rival slave states and their encroach­ments on barbarian freedom to extend their domains and build mighty empires until barbarian conquerors from freer lands brought their insolvent glory low.

 

 All political institutions are founded on force. They flourished widely in the “Fertile Crescent” and other ancient easy-living lands. It was here alone that the slave-based military sovereignties character­istic of nearly all ancient times arose; for it was here alone that their worst rigors could be withstood and the population yet survive. In rugged or remote and less fertile lands where movement and migra­tion, especially migration by sea, had occasioned more efficient re­lationships than kinship alone affords, the political submergence was delayed and of necessity less complete. It was here that the non­-coercive authority of proprietorship, growing out of patriarchy, tended furthest to evolve and the political domination, when it fol­lowed, took less drastic forms. Free relationships gave way to servile feudalism, and this, in turn, to tax-based sovereignties imposing direct and personal servitude only in case of special circumstances or offense.

 

 When the primitive voluntarism of many ancient settled lands gave way to sovereignty over slaves, greater rulers made war against the lesser, and those conquered but not destroyed became satraps or viceroys under kings. Not the proprietary but the sovereign power grew. Slave states and powers alone prevailed. These despotisms ran through long dynasties of the Near and Middle East, the valley of the Nile and Mediterranean shores. They turned the “Fertile Cres­cent” into starveling lands, set the pattern for absolute government for all later time and, in the slave-founded democracies of the Greeks and the slave-based republicanism of Rome, established the Classical tradition for the founding of modern “free governments” when both servile feudalism and the kingly power declined.

 

 In rugged lands the primal bounty of the earth would not yield subsistence to both masters and slaves. Only to free men could the earth sufficiently respond. It was here that free feudal communities best evolved and neither absolute sovereignty nor absolute slavery was known. Not in the alluvial lands nor in the great grass plains but among the mountains and in the wooded lands, the ancient seeds of liberty were sown. Great tribal princes from the treeless plains could scourge the empires of the East, but they could build no em­pires of their own. Subsistence on their great grasslands was seasonal; it kept them too much on the move to form communities, either slave or free. As deserts encroached upon their grassy plains, men of like breed drove westward to the Golden Horn and took dominion far and wide but brought no breath of freedom there. It was the bar­barians of the wooded west, and not from the east, who attempted to set up free institutions where their arms prevailed.

 

 When the imperial power of Rome went down upon the ruin it had wrought, the barbarians took dominion and free communities, far and wide, again were formed. They were always predial — based on the tenure of land — and thus tended to become proprietary in­stead of political. Far into the dark aftermath of Rome, the more peace-loving possessors of land conveyed their allodial or other hold­ings to stronger lords on pledge of protection against violence and took freehold or leasehold titles, with obligation of rent or rent service, in exchange. These medieval beginnings of voluntary feudalism were, on the Continent at least, overwhelmed by the Roman ideology and tradition of political domination and power. Feudalism, in its free proprietary and non-political operation, was perverted by Roman politics into the servile feudalism that kept Continental Europe in darkness for a thousand years. But in Saxon England, the fall of freedom was long delayed and she came into a glory all her own before her subversion was complete and Roman institutions were imposed by force of Norman arms.

 

  Nothing in history is more certain than that the Teutonic tribes generally had none of the Roman concept of an absolute mystical or transcendental sovereign state. They had no multi-millennial tradi­tion of slave subservience or of abject loyalty to an abstraction under cover of which priest and potentate alike claimed sanction for naked force and conquest of arms. Their suffrages went to leadership and service, to personal worth and not to investiture of office and arbi­trary power. They “stamped out the Roman State” and organized “according to the immemorial fashion of their own politics, on the basis of freehold tenure of the land and local administration.” But on the Conti­nent, “government gradually worked its way out from the individualism inherent in the habits of the German races back into an absolutism not un­like that of the Roman Empire.”[2]

 

 The new barbarian beginnings were profoundly affected by the Roman traditions of absolute power and the mystical ideology of the Roman State. As one writer describes it,

“When the German settled down as master amongst the Roman­ized populations of western and southern Europe, his thought was led captive by the conceptions of Roman law, as all subse­quent thought that has known it has been, and his habits were much modified by those of his new subjects; but his strong ele­ment of individualism was not destroyed by the contact.”[3]

 

 Prompted by the same instinct towards societal instead of political organization as their Anglo-Saxon kindred overseas, the northern tribes that broke through the Roman barriers at the Rhine established in their new possessions not political but proprietary public institu­tions based on the ownership of land for authority and on voluntary rent for public revenue. But they came among people who had never been accustomed to anything but political domination and who con­tinued to idealize the iron authority and the austere codes and insti­tutes, the administrative law and supposedly protective power of once imperial Rome. These imperial traditions beguiled the bar­barian mind even as they ruled the Classical and still so much mis­lead the modern learned mind. Thus again in the emergence from tribalism to freedom, the nascent institutions of free society were compromised at their new beginnings. As in Saxon England, the basic form was that of voluntary feudalism, the free proprietary; but the spirit became that of politics and war. For the revenues for com­munity needs came not to be paid by free men to land lords by con­tract and consent, according to the value each received, but by per­version of rent into taxation and of public proprietorship into the essential tyranny of tribute-taking sovereignties in the manner of de­cadent Rome. Thus arose the servile feudalism that darkened Europe for a thousand years — a repetition, only measurably humanized, of the predatory slave states of ancient times. The submergence of Anglo-Saxon England by the Norman Duke completed the de­struction of free community development in medieval times.

 

 Nonetheless, rising out of barbarian freedom and fostered by the Church, a new spirit was rising in the hearts of common men. They began to feel themselves as individuals distinct from their fellow men and from the whole, that each should own himself and thereby own other things and thus be able to make free engagements — contracts — with respect to himself, his services and his property ac­cording to the consensus of all present and the particular agreement of those with whom he dealt. Rival barons amid their local wars had not consolidated into kings, and there were no great sovereignties over land or seas. Hence, out of the break-up of servile feudalism, men found a measure of liberty to prosper one another through contractual engagements and not to be wholly tax-despoiled. Guilds were formed and market towns and fairs. New communities and free towns, “oases in the feudal forest,” were established, wresting their freedom from feudal lords. Pirates became merchants, and their coastal cities rose to wealth and power. By the eleventh century, servile feudalism was beginning to decay, and men found freedom, even riches, in the industries and trading of the cities and towns. The “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” promised a new era.

 

 But in mutual wars, the power of landed dukes and barons slowly fell to central kings, and the free communities, towns and leagues, in their rivalries and wars, likewise lost their independence and their liberties to sovereign central powers. Then popular governments arose to abolish serfdom, the power and privilege of the landed lords, and to curb the taxing power of kings by transferring to periodically elected persons and to a permanent establishment set up by them the general power to tax and rule — all under constitutional limitations which these governments themselves, and they alone, had authority to interpret and apply. Thus developed nationalistic central sovereignties — the modern predatory political states — raised on the productiveness that grew out of new freedom when the ineffi­ciencies of servile feudalism forbade continuance to its rigid forms.

 

 Born out of revolutionary violence, holding no property administratively as proprietors, employing no wealth productively as capital, these present-day political states have no natural or unforced revenue. Hence they must depend upon widely organized systems of collection and coercion that are not self-limiting, as is community rent, but tend constantly to expand. Thus they grow increasingly inimical to the continuance of civilized society. Such systems of revenue by compulsion in place of contract, however much accepted or resisted, are the bane of free society today as were serfdom and slavery in medieval and in ancient times.

 

 Yet a benign and beneficent, a creative alternative is in the making and, in the degree that it is discovered, will the more increasingly prevail. The current deficiency of robust research in this field is what exposes many to the harsh logic of absolutism, with its siren seduc­tions of government in toto and society nil.

 

 There are rich traditions from the past and endless examples today — too long neglected in scholarly research as in current thought — of community administration that employs no coercion yet yields to their administrators a natural income gauged to the value of such portion of the common services as each tenant separately enjoys and for which he willingly pays. This is the proprietary method of administration. It is characteristic of all free enterprise and is expressly exemplified historically in the Anglo-Saxon free community, in modern corporate hotel communities and in all other community properties whose occupants, permanent or temporary, are well and justly served and in no wise taxed, ruled or enslaved.

 

 Evidence of free communities and of early voluntary feudalism are found in ancient Mexico and Japan and in many lands, but no­where so definitely or for so long a period as in Medieval England before the Normans came.

 

 The Anglo-Saxon tribes were the least and the last to be affected by absolute and imperial conceptions. The free proprietary pattern of responsible public services through contractual engagements be­tween proprietary authorities and free men had, in England, respite of a half-millennium to grow and come to flower with Alfred in his Golden Age. When the sea-borne Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, they were no more confronted with Roman institutions than they were with Roman power. Here, out of rude barbarism, in virtual isolation from imperial traditions, a basic system of proprietary public administration through centuries of tribal conquest and con­fusion slowly and imperfectly evolved. It resisted but also set example for later kindred invaders from overseas and, in a peace without victory over the kindred Danes, it blossomed under Alfred, the “Servant of Servants,” in the midst of Europe’s darkest gloom. The public authority, beginning with the local community affairs, was not maintained by the exercise of force upon the inhabitants. Not taxes but rent or rent service was the public revenue. And it was not arbitrary; for it was determined by contract or common custom of the market, thereby gauged to the value of the public administration, and assessed by automatic consent of the free-holders themselves.

 

 This development was necessarily gradual and uneven. Doubtless there were at all times communities in various states. But all public authority was based on the ownership of land and maintained wholly by the dues or revenues, in service, coin or products, that the public servicing of the lands brought forth. Slavery was not unknown, but for lack of any political system to support it, slavery as an institution could not be maintained. The Anglo-Saxon kings were primarily land owners. As war leaders and kings, they were chosen from among their fellow proprietors only by election or in emergency. During the heptarchy there was a tendency towards the Roman type of kingship, but this came into its full and final effect only in the polity of force imposed by the might of the Norman arms — a Roman type of absolute state whose compulsive processes and powers have passed since then with but little change from kings to predatory lords and then to commons and cabinets elected or supported by popular vote.

 

 Of high historic significance for the modern growth of free com­munity has been an important though little remarked development of the last two hundred years. Just as the ancient Classical democracies and Republican Rome rose in rebellion against monarchical excesses and decay, so in our own times have their modern imitations, our predatory political states — democratic in theory yet essentially pre­dacious, internally at least — again risen in rebellion against the kingly power, and landed barons along with sovereign kings lost all their former power to tax and rule. Thus, the institution of property in land is transformed in modern times from a political and coercive authority into a most essential non-political department of society for the social, that is, the free contractual distribution of sites and lands, and for the vastly further public functions that it is destined, as it evolves, freely and with enormous profit to perform.

 

 The next great step in free community development, rooted deeply in the simple freedoms of the past, still waits the future. Early historical research, the great Anglo-Saxon precedent and the modern owner-administration of hotel and similar properties that supply community services to their inhabitants, all give warrant to predict the formation of proprietary community-service authorities at the general community level, by the basic realty owners pooling their separate titles and holding equivalent undivided ownership interests in the whole. Political administration being what it is, community owners will not long fail to unite once the many advantages are seen. United as a business and organized to serve, they will give not mere occupancy alone, but positive and protective public serv­ices as well, for sake of the new rents and higher values that will accrue to their properties and to their organization — a community revenue and value created by their community services and not extorted by force. In this clear and far-sighted business opportunity, there is promise of public authorities qualified to give governmental
services without resort to government as force, creating their own revenues and thereby solvent, exempt from the historic cycle of rise, decline and fall.

 

 Proprietary community-service authorities will be formed, small perhaps at first, but, because of the prosperity of the populations served and protected by them, growing in number, size and scope. Such authorities will develop interrelationships respecting joint and reciprocal projects and services that will constitute them eventually into that world-wide integration of public service and protection for which the hearts of men so deeply yearn and as yet so vainly dream. These public authorities will administer enormous properties and earn such abundant profits that virtually the entire highly pros­pered general public will seek proud investment in their securities and shares. Thus, authentic community democracies will naturally evolve. In this there are enormous implications too extensive and ideal to be expanded here. But the intelligent imagination can foresee proprietary community-service authorities, organized as local com­munity proprietors over extensive areas, comprising many com­munities and establishing associative relationships among themselves in order to provide wider services on a regional, a national and eventually on an international and world-wide scale.               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 18

Public Services by the Community Owners

Community Without Coercion

When anything, such as land or wealth, has been reduced to a particular ownership and thus become property, it is then capable of being social-ized. The members of a society have entered spontan­eously into a peculiar relationship among themselves with respect to that thing. Whereas before there was no rule governing anyone’s possession or use of the thing but dominion only by force and sub­servience by weakness — an essentially slavish relationship — there now prevails a new relationship in which all antagonisms are resolved and the wills of the parties are brought into one accord. This new re­lationship is effectuated by a community process that is essentially democratic in the sense that it ascertains and executes both the indi­vidual and the community will.

 

 Their several and separate rights of disposition over services, goods or lands having been established, the members of the society gather in suitable places where they call out to all or to one another their several wishes concerning the redistribution of the services, goods or lands of which they are severally entitled and possessed. As this voting proceeds, meetings of minds occur. Contracts are made and exchanges take place in fulfillment of the mutual and the community will. If there be coercions and restraints upon free exchange, such interferences cannot arise from anything in the nature of the ex­change process itself but only from its infringement and limitation by a power or condition extraneous and contrary to it and from which this social freedom of contract and consent is then only a partial emancipation or escape.

 

 The social-ization of a thing, then, when properly understood, is the abrogation of coercive and the practice of contractual relations between and among men with regard to its disposition and use. Ownership is, therefore, a condition precedent to social-ization, for men can dispose or use by contract,

exchange and mutual consent only such things as an individual (or corporate entity) can own, and then only to the extent that the ownership remains free and not in­fringed by taxation or other limitation forcibly imposed.

 

[INSERT FIGURE 4 HERE]

 

 In a social-ized community, lands, improvements and other capital goods let out or otherwise used for the purposes of production and trade are owned not exclusively but in-clusively of others, the others being included in the use and benefit of them by the social process of mutual service by contract and exchange.

 

 At the very foundation of this social system, this using of property for the serving of others, lies the institution of property in land.

 

 Until the day when, by a social convention, specific persons are recognized and accepted as owners of the land and thereby invested with community authority to hold it or distribute it by a contractual process, the land remains un-social-ized and there is no security of possession or possibility of productive use. Upon it no society can exist. But as soon as it can be contractually held, distributed and dis­posed, then it may be peaceably and productively used, and then, but not until then, can wealth be produced and exchanged and the so­cietal process and function thus be performed.

 

 It is important to distinguish between production and exchange. Production is primarily physical. When, and only when, it is con­ducted in anticipation of or in connection with exchange, does it have any societal significance. Exchange, however, is wholly social, denoting a change in human relationships; it is beyond all physical processes, a matter of title and jurisdiction over physical things. Title does not depend upon production; it determines only the authority and the mode of distribution — that property may be distributed socially by purchase, sale or lease instead of by political or coercive administration, by the free Market instead of by the Citadel or state. And where production and distribution are separately considered, as is the case with those persons who purchase for resale, the legitimacy of high recompense for distributive services is seldom, if ever, questioned. Such distributors create, peaceably and democratically through the market, a new relationship between the members with respect to ownership of, or jurisdiction over, the thing sold.

 

 The principle is in all respects identical in the case of property in land. Land owners do not physically produce land, any more than the separate distributors of merchandise, or of its use, produce the property of which they distribute the ownership or use. Their land titles represent the authority conferred upon them to distribute land without having produced it precisely as the owners of merchandise distribute property that they have not produced — and for such simi­lar recompense as the open market in both cases awards.

 

 Land owners thus do create the value of land — that is, the value that the market awards to them for the service of distributing it by the societal process in lieu of primitive force or of governmental decree. If a land owner fails to perform such service, then he forfeits all recompense for it. He may, indeed, become a land user, but he can obtain no recompense or value for any distribution not performed by him.

 

 In periods of expanding contractual freedom with consequent rising productivity, there is a growing social need and effective de­mand for this contractual distribution of land. Such services, becom­ing increasingly important, are increasingly recompensed by the rising rents and values of land. During these periods of increasing productivity, land of all kinds is more intensively used and more land is drawn into use; hence there is greater need and higher recom­pense for distributing it.

 

 In the contrasting periods of more restricted and therefore less profitable productivity, such land as is being used is used less inten­sively. There is less social need and demand for its distribution, the recompense to land owners declines, and much land loses value and passes out of use. During such times, the owners of unused lands can perform only potential or stand-by services with respect to distribut­ing them — such services as are performed with respect to dis­tributing many other kinds of properties or essential services by per­sons who keep them available for long periods against the day or infrequent occasion when they shall come into active, perhaps urgent, demand.

 

 These periods of diminishing contractual freedom are periods of rising disemployment and idleness of capital, hence of labor and, consequently, also of land and of its owners and their agents and employees who would otherwise be engaged in its contractual distribution. In such periods, many owners of lands are compelled to relinquish them to the arbitrary administration of political authori­ties, the owners’ alternative, if any, being to suffer continued con­fiscation of their wealth or property of other kinds by way of taxa­tion based on and penalizing them for their ownership of land. Such political liquidation of land ownership, if not reversed, will of course result in the land being distributed by political persons who impose compulsive taxation and all its derivative tyrannies. Land adminis­tration would again fall back into the former ill repute from which it even now suffers as heritage from the historic past when it was un­differentiated from political power. The former political perversion of land administration by the tyranny of political lords over their tax-ridden land users still prejudices many otherwise competent minds against present-day land ownership, despite the complete divorcement of this modern institution from all political authority or other destructive power.

 

 The modern differentiation of land ownership out of the Citadel and into the contractual or service technique of the Market has been probably the one fundamental, although least remarked, social advance following upon the violent political revolutions that marked the latter part of the eighteenth century.

 

 The present twentieth-century reversal — this current tendency toward a complete “totalitarian” dominance of Citadel over both Market and Altar, ever encroaching on the freedom to own and to serve by exchange, imposing a compulsive and therefore destructive administration of property by persons who do not own it — is a dark menace to the future of society and its free civilization. It is a certain guarantee of continuing world wars, lower levels of subsistence and a diminishing duration of life. This grave de-social-ization of men out of society by the increasing pressure of government upon con­tractual freedom can lead to nothing but poverty, slavery and war. The sword of tyranny must tomorrow make new and deeper wounds than those of yesterday and today.

 

 But in utter contrast to vain political expedients, all civilized communities do now receive their fundamental public service through the institution of property in land. This institution is all that stands between them and anarchy on the one hand or tyranny on the other in the distribution of land: the administration of nature’s gifts to mankind. Its services are societal, not political. All its processes are contractual. It is wholly of the Market. It claims no sovereignty, makes no conquests for loot, levies no tribute on society. Instead, it receives a voluntary revenue in the exact proportion that it serves. Once the nature of property in land is perceived and its potentialities realized, it will automatically and without substantial opposition ex­tend its proprietary administration ever more widely into the com­munity services and needs and will receive its voluntary, its just and honorable rewards.

 

 The public services that the public owners now perform — namely, their non-violent and non-discriminatory distribution of the com­munity advantages, sites and lands — need only be extended to the full administration of the common properties, the public ways and lands and their capital improvements and the community services supplied thereby, to transform government from an essential tyranny into a prosperous agency of highly recompensed public service. Such community authority, being proprietary instead of political, will establish its own community services, both positive and pro­ductive, and lease out its sites and resources to the most efficient and productive occupiers under guarantee of quiet and unmolested pos­session. In the interest of its own income and values, it will neither impose nor permit the imposition of taxation or other violence. For the unforced revenues coming to such owner-administrators, not alone from their merely distributive services, as at present, but from the sale also of community services in general — peace and protection against violence, whether public or private, as adjunct to possession — will render taxation and the like compulsions profitless and vain.

 

 The value of any property lies in its administration. When it is administered by being sold, the value is the price received; when it is administered by being let out, its value is the rent received. The value of a community, of a city or of a state, is the value received by its owners for whatever community services they give or perform. Let those services so protect and aid and

convenience the inhabitants that their productivity can be high, then the community income and the community values will be high. Such is the natural automatism of public service and   reward — to the full extent that the public services are performed by the public owners, both now and in the time to come. Automatic social revenue to the community owners, suitably organized to take over increasingly the public  services, is the grand creative alternative to the tax and deficit practices, to the essential bankruptcy and habitual failure of all political administra­tion and political power.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 19

Societal Development Through Extension of the System of Contract and Exchange

If society were a mere collection of lifeless materials, a structure might be designed and built from them to specification and plan, the energy being applied from without. But society is a living organization of energy, an organism constituted of living parts inter-functioning among themselves; the impulse and guidance of its higher transformation is not to be externally applied; it must arise from within. The process of the transformation, therefore, cannot be imposed, but it may with high probability be forecast — extrapolated out of the present and the past.

 

 Written history is largely an account of the injuries, of the wars and enslavements, that have been suffered and imposed. But civilization has grown and exists only because of the services that have been performed and mutually exchanged. The story of the advance of civilization is not the story of its opposite — of the conflicts and wars that have impeded it; it is the story of the widening reciprocation of services under the golden rule of exchange, in which civilization finds its life and on which all its glories depend. A civilized society is dis­tinguished from the uncivilized by the system of services and ex­change by which its parts interfunction to give it organic unity and life. The historic development of this interfunctioning has been manifesting itself in the growing quantity and variety, quality and beauty of the services and goods that have been performed and ex­changed, the services being specialized and in large part, but not ex­clusively, incorporated in properties and goods prior to exchange. Such incorporation of services for others is commonly called “pro­duction.” It transforms the environment and thereby raises the quality of human life and extends its term.

 

 When the services performed do not change any physical things