Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2638

Letter from V. Orval Watts, 1185 East Foothill Boulevard, Altadena, California

June 29, 1957

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

Many thanks for sending me a copy of your new book, CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR. I have already begun reading it, and I find it stimulating and enlightening as all of your other writings have been. I have never forgotten the new understanding which I received from you on the subject of land rent and Georgism, and your new book is similarly helping to advance my thinking in other directions.

 More to let you know I am reading your book and thinking about it than in any antagonistic spirit, I should like to say that I would have used the term “freedom” instead of “democracy” to cover the condition of “Doing things together by consent of all and coercion of none.” (p.233)

 On the other hand, I especially like your definitions of “capital” and “labor.”

 “Economics” I would define more widely than you do (p.235), to include the relationships involved in the use of human energy as labor (as well as the use of property as capital). I suspect that your omission here was a slight oversight rather than the result of a conscious effort to exclude services of persons that involve no capital (e.g., singers, teachers). Adam Smith and some of his followers excluded singers, domestic servants, teachers, etc. from the category of “productive” labor on the ground that their products were not durable. I doubt that you had this in mind.

 Your definition of slavery as an enforced choice of evils (p. 45) is an ideological gem. I shall certainly use it, along with a host of other brilliant feats of logic.

 I can guess from my own efforts how much effort — agony — of body, mind and spirit went into the writing of this book. I shall study it, and know that I shall profit from it. Dr. Kershner of Christian Economics should also be much inter­ested in it. The Foundation for Econ. Ed. in Irvington needs its message, and I hope you may get a chance to deliver some of it to them in person, for their thinking there is so corrupted (as it seems to me) by the desire to defend taxation that it is likely to take personal contact to persuade them of the value of your book.

 Thank you again — not merely for the copy of the book, but more especially for the vast effort you put into the thought and writing.

 

Sincerely,

 

(signed) V. Orval Watts

 

 

                   /Added in pen:/

 

 I spend most of my time these days (as for more than a year past) on my history of “Money and Banking in American Politics” (from 1620 to the present). It is a good year from publication, but under separate cover I’ll send you a copy of a report I wrote recently for the So. Calif. Edison Co., which will suggest the point of view of my history. Friends tell me that so far the MSS. is “fascinating”..etc.   V. O. W.