Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2408

First page (second is missing) of a letter to George S. Montgomery, Jr., 488 Madison Avenue, New York 22, NY

July 1, 1955

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Montgomery:

 

Ever since reading your Return of Adam Smith, and reflecting much upon it, I have had you in mind with a view to your more or less active cooperation in advancing a sound understanding of our free enterprise and free society along the lines so admirably laid down by Adam Smith.

 

 There is, of late years, a growing, substantial opposition to the totalitarian drift. Since my retirement from active business, I have been strongly in sympathy with this negative opposition, but this alone has not satisfied me. I have been forced to recognize that this at its best could only defer, in the long view, the self-enlarging role of government.

 

 As a research engineer, I have long believed that we could discover a positive technology in which the contractual and non-coercive processes of free enterprise could be extended beyond those individual services that can be separately provided and enjoyed and into the administration of those services and commodities which can be had only in community form. Adam Smith laid it down (Wealth of Nations, Modern Library edition, page 248) that the land-owning interest is the one and only portion of society whose private advantage is directly and immediately dependent upon the public advantage. Following this, and noting with what disastrous results Henry George (and land nationalizers generally) went off on a wholly different tangent, I have developed a positive view looking to the evolution of proprietary community administration to displace by its own natural growth the customary political mal-administration of which we have so much to complain. I have found the virtues of society more interesting than the vices of government.

 

 To publicize this through my remaining years by good employment of some substantial financial resources of my own, is my single remaining objective. I want your sympathy and friendship, and your professional assistance and

                                      /Second page missing/