Spencer Heath Archive

Item 169

Typed by Heath on 3-ring binder paper, intending to discuss for businessmen the major role of the landed interest beyond that of contractually distributing sites and resources, but not getting beyond distribution.

January 3, 1952

 

 

 

/THE BASIC PUBLIC SERVICE OF

DISTRIBUTING WHEREON WE STAND/

    

     Actions among men are of only two kinds — balanced and unbalanced. There are actions, voluntary, contractual, by which all rise and are prospered, and actions that are dictated and compelled, in which some rise only as others are pulled down. The line is not vague. On one side, force or fraud, government and war; on the other, peace and freedom, services and success, and length of days.

    

     Freedom is equality in exchange. It is new and young. It pays profits, yields dividends. Only in recent centuries, you men of business have won it — so much of freedom as we have — by vitalizing, under the rule of contract and exchange, of profits and values, the, ancient arts and crafts that were almost wholly dictated and destroyed by governments of old.

 

     You, in modern times, have raised the values and the length of lives that governments were not yet powerful enough to absorb or destroy.

 

     It is crucial now that you discover how and what you have done and that you extend your value-building, your money-making, free enterprise into the field of community services and public capital, the political administration of which is set to devour the whole free economy.

 

     Free enterprise creates /its/ own values. Property is organized and administered by its owners for the benefit and advantage of others who enjoy its services or products and who give profit and value in turn for value received.

 

     Political administration, without free contract and exchange, creates no values. It begins with the seizure of property and prevention of exchange and it ends when there is no more to seize or prevent. It rests upon ancient habits of thought and the strange misconception that government can be miraculous and divine — that it can transform seizures into services — that it can give to a people more instead of less, far less, than it taketh away.

 

     In the world of business a single principle, and not its adulteration, prevails. Men most succeed who most observe and practice the Golden Rule of mutual, market-measured exchange wherein each has equal authority over his own and each serves others according to his abilities and his possessions — and his freedom from government so to do — and is accordingly served and profited in return.

 

     This Golden Rule is what marks off services from servitude, freedom from oppression, society from slavery. Most of us are unconscious of it. Few give it any credit for the freedom that we have. Fewer still understand how it operated at the very foundation of community life through the institution of property in land. This basic institution of civilized men gives them whatever freedom they have alike from raw anarchy on the one hand and the tyranny of a totalitarian state at the other extreme.

 

     Property in land is nature’s only gateway from barren tribal nomadism into the blessings of civilized community life. Proprietors are the first established public officers, the first to function. Once their particular titles are established, there is a substitute for violence or fraud, an alternative procedure for the allocation and distribution of /titles to/ community sites and resources and thereby of all the community services appurtenant to them. For this service of distribution by the equities of contract, of lease or sale, each proprietor is recompensed by current ground rent or by prospective ground rent capitalized at the point of sale. And the public is best served, as the proprietor is best recompensed, by each site falling to the highest bidder, for he it must be who can make it most productive and thus most enrich the common markets and enhance the common wealth.

 

     This identity of the private with the public interest was perceived by Adam Smith and the French economists more than a century ago but is today practically unknown — obscured by the Medieval notion that not taxation but rent is the cause of poverty and war.

 

     The contractual, and thus non-political, distribution of community sites and resources is at once the basic community or public service and also the foundational security without which no free enterprise or any other freedom from governmental domination can be maintained.

 

     But the community proprietors, until they are organized

 

 

                                           /Breaks off/