Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3201

Carbon of letter to Clarence E. Manion, 403 St. Joseph Bank Bldg., South Bend, Indiana

July 15, 1955

 

 

Dear Dr. Manion:

 

     So much have I admired the depth and richness of your mind as shown in your various writings and in their resemblance to those of Dean Roscoe Pound whom I also greatly admire, I am moved to suggest to you that in the contractual and non-coercive administration of property, God (or Nature) has endowed mankind with an evolving free and creative relationship of reciprocal exchange wherein great riches and abundance of life are increasingly achieved.

 

     May it not be possible for men to learn to extend this Golden Rule principle to include also the administration of the public properties and services creatively without coercion or compulsions and for honest profit, just as private proprietors of community properties (such as hotels and the like) are able to do?

 

     In the whole literature of legal theory, from and before Aristotle and on down, there are just two contrasting views of authentic public law: One, that a people should be ruled by a body of abstract principles and precepts, more or less idealized, to which all legal enactments and decisions should conform. The other, that the authentic law consists simply in whatever the established (de facto) political power enacts or decrees as such.

 

     I am happy to share in your very definite bias in favor of the former, but I cannot deny the truth that whatever be the principle or precept it cannot be politically enforced without resort to violence and ex-propriation in some degree against the persons and the properties of the subjects or citizens. And once this authority to seize and tax is exercised, history affords no example of it ever being permanently at any level restrained.

 

     Since God (or Nature) has provided a Golden Rule of contract without coercion for the fruitful administration of other large corporate properties, may we not suppose He has provided also means for extension of this non-coercive kind of administration to the general property of a community as soon as it shall be similarly organized by its owners in united or corporate form as a divine alternative to the present Iron Rule of coercion and ultimately war?

 

     A key to this alternative may be found in the classic distinction in the literature between the proprium or dominium and the imperium; between the right of property and its contractual administration and the political prerogative; between the right of ownership resting on public title and common consent and exercised by contract, and the right of ex-propriation springing from discovery, conquest or supine surrender and exercised by force.

 

     As a scholar, doubtless you are well aware that the imperium historically in most if not all cases has been preceded by a proprietary administration of community services and needs, such as sprang up over much of medieval Europe upon dissolution of the Roman power, and most notably in England for some five centuries before the Conquest. That proprietary administration was in most cases broken down by rivalries among the community proprietors, necessitating resort to taxation to maintain their petty wars. Corruption of the proprietary authorities seems to have been delayed in England by reason of its remoteness from Continental influences, so that the proprietary system was not completely destroyed until the Conquest in 1066 when a servile feudalism was forcibly imposed.

 

     It is significant that the basic Common Law of England was socially evolved between the fifth century and the tenth, during which time proprietary communities were the rule and under them civilization in England rose to the “Golden Age of Alfred,” coincident with the darkness at its nadir in Continental lands. The typical community was owned and administered by a personal or a corporate land-lord providing security and services to free-men——men who were free because they were related to the public authority by contract instead of compulsion, the rent or services they rendered being determined by contract or custom as the equivalent of the protection and other advantages they as occupants severally received.

 

     May it not be possible that in the foreseeable future, highly specialized owners of metropolitan communities will merge their separate holdings by vesting them in a single corporation and taking in exchange shares of stock according to the appraised values of their several and respective contributions?

 

     Such a community corporation would then be in the business of administering its total properties for the benefit of their rent-paying inhabitants, receiving voluntary revenue for use of its properties and sales of its services, just as any other productive corporation does.

 

     It could produce and distribute public services and amenities of every kind and thereby obtain large revenue in the rent voluntarily paid for such services and amenities and in the vast values that would accrue. A corporation of this kind would be under no temptation to impose taxation or violence in any degree. It would be under the strongest motivation to defend the inhabitants of its properties, their properties and their businesses from every kind of loss or harm, lest its own values and income be destroyed or at least impaired. And such a municipal or regional corporation, becoming rich and prosperous, the inhabitants of its properties would almost of a certainty be both able and eager to buy into its shares of stock and thereby become, in proportion to their ownership, themselves the ultimate prideful and truly democratic public community authority.

 

     Such is the alternative that exists in the nature of things, as I see it, to the present anomalous practice of non-owning and, thereby, irresponsible community authorities coercing the community inhabitants in order, supposedly, to protect them and otherwise publicly serve. On a separate sheet I am sending you a brief prospectus suggesting how such a community owning corporation might be established.

 

     I should be most happy to have you advise me what you think of the possibility of a new advance in social evolution through the development of proprietary and contractual in lieu of political and coercive community administration. It may seem at first sight an unlikely avenue of investigation, but it should be remembered that great advances after long delays often spring from the most unexpected sources.

 

     Congratulating you on the fine contributions you have made towards the public enlightenment with respect to public affairs and with great respect,

 

                        Sincerely yours,

 

 

 

SH/m

ENC: “Notes on the Organization of Real Estate”