Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2364

Letter from Gilbert Tucker, President, Economic Education League, Inc., 128 State Street, Albany, NY

March 9, 1954

 

My dear Mr. Heath:

I appreciate your letter of the 28th just received but to be brutally frank about it I do not get the idea that you are driving at. I do not understand at all what change, if any, you would like to make in our present system. I do not know whether you propose to continue to confiscate the private property, which is justly private property because it is the product of life and labor, or whether you propose to substitute for it a collection of a fair return earned by the investment made by the taxpayers and by all the people. I don‘t know what method you propose to meet the housing problem. You do not make clear to me whether you imagine that the Georgists wish to annul land titles and land tenure. It seems to me you imply that they do. Of course as you say the land-owner interest performs a distributive service although I doubt if they save us from violence and arbitrary discriminations. Quite the contrary. I certainly would favor leaving a small proportion of the ground rent in their hands as a nominal fee for the trivial service which they render of administering land titles. I would have no objection at all, I think I would rather favor collecting only ninety-five percent of the ground rent for the common use and good.

 I do not see what measure you would propose to get away from the conditions which we have today where our present tax system almost forces many to refrain from improving their properties and putting it to any productive use and at the same time makes it impossible to sell such holdings. I have myself had an experience like this. What should have been a valuable piece of property had its value practically destroyed because taxa­tion prevented building upon it and preventing building upon it killed its value. I don‘t see what you can offer as a cure for this.

 Perhaps I am wrong in trying to judge your ideas because I do not get what they are. In spite of long talks with you, your brilliant material and your letter I do not know what you propose. Apparently you would continue the land-owning inter­est. So would I but I would not permit them to collect a large proportion of the ground rent but only a very trivial proportion to pay for the trivial service which they sometimes render. No one wants to see the state destroy titles and take titles to the land or to act as a landlord. Their job is simply to collect the ground rent which belongs to all the people and to use it for all the people.

 If you have prepared anything like a definite platform of action or positive proposal I should like very much to see it and will give it careful consideration. Not only have I never seen anything of this sort from your pen but I have never been able to get any clear idea of what you propose. It looks as if your idea was to continue the present system unchanged permitting private interests to profit by the appropriation of the earnings of investments made by all the people for which in many cases they render no service whatever. In fact they often render a dis-serviee in holding land out of use or using it contrary to the public inter­est for the maintenance of slum buildings breeding almost every social evil. Then on top of this society rewards them by letting them pocket an enormous profit resulting from what all society has done and to which they have contributed nothing but opposition.

 I don’t see what you mean when you talk about the necessity for an allocation of sites and resources. This has been done. Practically all our land is privately owned. I don^ft get it at all. You say that nature already employs ground rent to obtain this most fundamental of all social requisites, allocation of sites and resources. How? I don’t see that nature enters into it. I don’t see that there is any proper allocation of sites and resources. It^fs a case of mad scramble and stealing. You say it is too much to suppose that this vital function can be entrusted to our enemy, the state. Of course nobody wants the state to allocate sites and resources. The function of the state is to leave that alone and let people work out the distribution of land as they see fit but to require that everyone that uses any share of our common heritage from the Almighty shall pay a just return to society for the values which society creates and which he enjoys.

 I have tried to pin you down in conversation and find out just what you proposed to do but never with any success and your literature doesn’t help me either. If you can make it clear in a definite, practical way I certainly will give your proposal open-minded consideration but it seems to me that both in conversation and in the written or printed page you are very vague and indefinite with no positive program and with a great many mis­statements or mis-implications. I just don’t know what you mean when you speak of “George’s proposed resort to the iron rule of politics and legislation in place of that higher golden rule, con­tract and exchange”.

 To me this is just words. Why is there any iron rule of politics or legislation in the people recovering through that vast cooperative enterprise which we call the state the return earned by the investment which they have made in our common heritage?

 Unless we can get down to brass tacks and unless you can frame your philosophy in some words which are understandable to my feeble intellect I don’t think that there is much gained by further discussion.

 

Cordially yours,

 

(signed) Gilbert Tucker

President