Spencer Heath Archive

Item 188

Pencil by Heath. How about amending this to complete Item 184?

July 29, 1947

     Because some services, such as protection or defense, must be in common there must be common or community (com-munito) services. Such services must be performed, if at all, by some single organized authority. This authority must be either (1) political and coercive or (2) proprietary and contractual. If it is political, no revenue comes to it by exchange, in recompense for anything given, but only in consequence of coercion and force. If it is proprietary, consisting of the owners of the physical community, then by the process of contract and not coercion, it receives revenue in exchange for and in proportion to whatever common services it gives. Its primary common service consists in distributing the possession of sites and resources, natural advantages, by the free process called contractual, instead of by the coercive process which, when organized, is called political. This can be done by none other than the proprietary authority because none but its owner can make or perform any contract with respect to a site or resource; only what is owned can become the subject-matter of contract. This contractual distribution of sites and natural advantages obviates the necessity of force or fraud with respect to them. It also places automatically each productive site or resource in the hands of him who can make it most so and thus contribute most to the common (open) markets, for only he can pay the highest rent or price for this purely contractual community or public service.

     Only the non-coercive distribution of natural community advantages is thus far referred to. If there be artificial community “services,” such as policing or public works, politically administered, then any net advantage, if any there be, above the tyranny inflicted in so supplying them, will be added to the natural advantages and likewise distributed contractually by the proprietary power.

To obviate the essential tyranny (coercion) of political administration the proprietary authority, suitably organized, must extend its jurisdiction, and thus its revenues, by itself supplying police and other community services without coercion, out of its own revenues and properties, and thus raise its own values and voluntary incomes.

     This evolution out of destructive coercive authority into productive contractual relationships has been always the key to civilized progress. Its marks on the high road of history are patent to all, yet but little heeded because so simply subtle and so little understood. Thus has Destiny drawn savage man into his partial pastures of life as she has set the systems of the stars — out of coercion into contract, out of chaos into reciprocal harmony and light.