Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2832

Penciling by Heath on five notepad pages “a” to “e.”

No date

Property in land is now a social and no longer a political institution. Its separate properties in any community are as contiguous as the rooms or suites in a hotel. They constitute communities, but they are as yet administered separately and not united in any common organization to police and protect them and thereby their occupants against either private or political depredations and tyrannies or to provide any other common services to the community and thereby to its protected occupants.

  The present separate administration of the community sites and resources can extend no further than the basic community service of making a social (contractual) allocation of them by the free process of the market on equal terms to all, without which public service no degree of freedom or security from government would exist, and for which basic service ground rent (land value) is presently and commensurately received. But corporate or similar consolidation of the separate holdings being only the exchange of separate legal titles for common equities, so far from causing any further concentration of ownership will provide a means for its being conveniently and widely dispersed. As soon as the separate properties are pooled in a community organization then these at-present purely distributive services can expand into greatly needed further public services (without any tax or other depredation) and thereby create further free community revenue (ground rent) to the full value of the further services.

  These services will take the form first of standing guard continuously between all those in productive occupancy of the community sites and resources and some of the worst extravagances of the politicians in power. This will diminish the tax load for all, but preferentially that of the occupants and of the former separate owners who through their proportionate equities in the new organization have become owners in common of the assembled properties.

  In a community so protected and served more and more persons will desire and can well afford to become tenants thus raising both their number and the rate of revenue from them and more and more of any remaining separate owners will thus be doubly induced to turn in their individual titles for equities of equal value in the united community organization. The new proprietorship will be in effect selling freedom and security to its inhabitants until the existing public capital and community operations are conducted at highest efficiency and least cost. All wages and profits will have risen as taxes declined and increasing profits of the proprietary authority will gradually have flowed back normally, as in all sound business, into maintenance of the community services whence its profits were derived.