Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2767

Extensive penciling on notepad paper marked “Part of draft of letter to WRO Wilcox Dec 1939” But note that “Wilcox” should have been spelled “Willcox.”

 

 

The radical difference between the payment of ground rent by voluntary engagements and in amounts prescribed by the consensus of the open market and the collection of compulsory tribute or taxation has been much too little realized. In the earlier and least mature thinking of both Herbert Spencer and Henry George there is no explicit recognition of the exchange process and relationships by which civilized men live and in the practice of which all their values arise. They assumed that values arose upon labor — upon what an individual does as an individual for himself by labor upon the materials of nature, rather than upon what men do socially for each other by way of service either with or without the production of any physical wealth. These thinkers did not think much about the exchange relationship except in terms of physical goods and since they saw none of these passing from a land owner in exchange for ground rent it was easy for them to consider that no service was performed by the land owner and therefore his appropriation of rent was of the same injurious nature as tribute or taxation. This misconception was the more easily entertained by reason of land owners having so often exercised the political power of compulsion and seizure without recompense, instead of the proprietary power of giving services and receiving voluntary recompense in exchange.

 

 The landlords of early Saxon communities, as of all indoor communities today, were servants of the tenants or guests whom they served. Their lordship over their own properties only and not over the wealth and properties of the tenants whom they protected and otherwise served. But when they have exercised political and governmental power on the Roman pattern the landed proprietors have practiced rulership instead of service-ship and laid compulsive tribute on the services and properties of the subjects under their rule. Thus in the Romanized feudal system proprietors degenerated from land-lords, serving free-men, to war-lords taxing their tenants into bond-men and serfs. This Roman technique of taxing subject populations out of the social use /of/ their property and into unemployment and disaster has now passed out of the hands of the landed classes and into the hands of such political demagogues as can command the support or gain the tolerance of popular majorities under the sway of blind fears and hates or the mass lethargy of stolid indifference. Thus through default of proprietors by their failure to protect their tenants’ properties and, most of all, by reverting to the same predatory technique that stifled all production and exchange and so extinguished al the values of the ancient world, the feudal aristocracies of the medieval period again degenerated from all the primitive exchange relationships of mutual service between land-lords and free men into the crude compulsive king-ships by divine right that led to the nineteenth-century republican revolt, which, again, as in ancient times, brings on in the guise of benevolence the demagogic and dictatorial rule of today.

 

 The revolutions of the 17^th century only for the time transferred compulsive power from the few to the many. For the process of mass enslavement by imposing tribute or taxation is an unstable power. Destroying all social or exchange values and yielding none, it ever palsies the hands that wield it, whether monarchical or republican and new masters and messiahs of the frenzied masses arise in the place of the old. But the historic cycles have their indirect effects without which the _________ and the shuttlecock of shifting compulsive power would be but weary repetition and no genius of history would appear; and it is the indirect, the long unobserved effects that are subtle and profound, not the collisions of old contending forces but the new transformations that emerge.

 

 The liberal revolutions of the 19th century completely divested the landed classes of their taxing and tribute-taking political powers thus disarming and displacing them as the destroyers of social values and limiting them to the peaceable and creative processes of the market and to the revenues that they must earn to enjoy. Thus have predatory proprietors been tamed and socialized and transformed into sellers of social services by exchange, precisely as sea pirates became transformed from raiders into traders and merchant men when they were disarmed and governments themselves took over their parasitic and predatory operations upon legitimate trade. ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­_________________________ It now remains for government itself to become socialized. If it continues to be compulsive and remains predacious on trade and without benefit of exchange it must destroy in the 20^th century all the community (land) values and all the private capital values that in the relative freedom of the 19^th century so strikingly arose. The socializing of government must follow upon a new enlightenment that will come into the world __________ with its discovery that the public and community services, of whatever kind, when performed by the owners of the community, are automatically recompensed site or ground rent is the fair recompense, spontaneously and democratically determined, that a society awards to the proprietary officers on whom its territorial jurisdiction is ________ reposed for all the public or community services performed or provided by them, precisely as in a hotel or other property that provides common or community services to the occupants, the rent, which is paid by consent and exchange — a rendre and not a prendre as the old books say of ground rent — is the automatic recompense to these indoor land lords for every kind of common service they provide or perform and that the occupants use and in common enjoy.

 

 The development of the corresponding natural and profitable services and relationships by the landed proprietary classes in the past has been inhibited by their neglect of their inherent rent and service relationship and their assumption of extraneous Roman rule in the role of conquerors levying tribute on subject populations and that benevolent despots ________________________. This has brought them low; for true and enduring greatness is only for those who become the servants and never the rulers of all. Since the turmoil of revolutions again has purged from the ownership of land all powers of rule and compulsion over those who occupy it, relegating owners to their primary and essential function of equitable distributors of community benefits and security (including stand-by services of this kind as to land that has not yet come into demand) the way is now clear for an awakened and enlightened landed interest consciously to step into the business of providing their communities with such services as will most enable them to carry on their business of employing and exchanging with each other and so produce the most wealth and values of every kind and especially of land values.

 

 Obviously, the public services for which there is most crying need is a measure of relief from the ruinous taxation that, to quote Henry George, is “sucking the life blood of capital and labor,” and from the public bankruptcies that in consequence impend. It becomes clearly their business, and their magnificent business opportunity, to begin these services in behalf of their present and prospective tenants and purchasers the aim and end of which will be “to abolish all taxation save that on land values.” There will be no need to abolish taxes on land value because the enormous new rent created by striking down even the taxes that are now entirely unnecessary for legitimate governmental purposes, apart from those that are not wasted or misapplied, would offset all existing land value taxes and liberate those funds, and vastly more, for the voluntary financing of the community business as a solvent and profitable going concern.

 

 This is the substance, stated in the practical terms of business reality, that lay behind the ecstatic vision of Henry George. This is what caused his daemon to warn him against every proposal to eliminate the proprietary interest with its functions and rewards, by allowing the administration of land to lapse into mere political favoritism and control. The stress and storm, the tragedy of his career, was in his mistaking what is, fundamentally and in practical application, only a constructive business adjustment for a moral dispensation to rally the evangels of light to the cause of __________ against the storied legions of death and darkness unleashed upon the world. He did not realize that the power of light is but that of illumination and that true morality is never the battle champion but ever the issue, the shield and product, arising from the growth of peaceful, profitable and constructive relationships. His torch of truth was dimmed by the flashing of his sword and he left a broken lance upon the field.

 

 Now, Mr. Willcox, I must ask you to forgive my having gone rhetorical and and extending this letter to immoderate length. I am really by habit and temperament a very meager writer and negligent correspondent. Of all the vast subject matter that burgeons daily into print very little seems worthy of the labor and the pains, and the things of which I would write, vital as they may be, must be passed over by the ______ many while they await the seeking eye and listening ear. But, upon occasion, there come, as from afar, glints and gleams that make the labor seem well worth the while.

 

 But please do not mistake my desires. I know all to well from my own experience how difficult it is to take up a more inclusive and seemingly contrary point of view in respect to beliefs we have long cherished and proclaimed. Let me assure you in all sincerity that I do not offer any of the ideas or beliefs stated in this letter for any ready acceptance or easy adoption.

 

 I only wish you to weigh them without haste and with your customary and kindly consideration.