Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1782

Pencil notes for a letter to John F. Wharton at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, 575 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York.

No date

 

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Wharton:

     The lives of men in society, as you know, are sustained by the services they perform for and exchange with one another. They pool these reciprocal services in marts of exchange to which they contribute in marvelously specialized abundance and from which they draw in a like abundance and in vast and intricate variety as well as abundance according to their special and individual needs and desires, and no man liveth by or for himself alone.

     This process of living by exchange is not emotional, for it is a balanced rational process, balanced according to equal numerical relationships between the units of money or credits that are employed to measure the equivalence of what is given with what is received in exchange — a process that determines the balance between what one gives and what one is rightly entitled to receive.

     The instrument employed among persons is called contract and the process is called competition — the only relationship among men in which they are equal — no master, no slave. For whoever can take by force is master and him who yields is slave. Buying and selling is creative. It makes abundance and creates values. Being without coercion on either side fulfills the precept and realizes the promise of the Golden Rule — the only rule by which men can eat and live instead of starve and die.

     When men sell, under supervision, their services alone and are paid by time or piece or operation as the gauge, then their pay is wages. When their pay is not so gauged and they sell not the use of themselves alone but the use of property and the purchased services of other men as well, then they are self-supervised administrators of capital and profit is the name by which their pay is called. When men unite their capital in corporate form, each retaining an undivided ownership in it all, and elect and thereby employ other men to administer the corporate property and sell its services or goods into the common public marts or pool, then the pay to the corporation is called profit and those portions of the corporate profit divided and withdrawn by its owners for their separate ownership or use are called dividends.

     Just as all wages are based on ownership of one’s self, so all profits are based on the ownership and administration of capital — on accumulations from wages and profits above what are consumed. Thus all production of services or goods under the contractual process, which alone involves no coercions among the contracting parties, consists in administration of property by the process of contract. All that civilized and long-lived men require of one another — each to the whole and from the whole to each according as he gains — comes from the proprietary administration of property, from contractual administration by its owners instead of arbitrary or political administration by non-owners, or ex-proprietors.

     There are only two kinds of property: that which is held only to be used and consumed by its holders, and that which is held for the use and benefit of others through the process of competition, contract and exchange. Likewise, there are only two kinds of administration, contractual and political. The contractual process obtains for the most part only with respect to such services and goods as people can have individually and separately one from another. The political process prevails almost exclusively with respect to the administration of those services and goods that must be had in common, community services, and cannot be had separately one from another. The proprietary system is productive. It is not only self-sustaining but bears the burden and expense of the entire political administration as well. In this it demonstrates its prodigious productive capacity, a miracle of vitality that gives perennial promise that it will ultimately prevail, despite its being ever borne down. It is weak from its immaturity, not from its imperfections. All other things it creates and distributes with more than lavish hands. But when it comes to the public or community services it has taken, albeit unconsciously and unknown, only the first and most essential step.

     By its institution of non-political ownership and administration of land the proprietary system is enabled to give a modern /?/ contractual instead of a political distribution of community sites and lands.

     A community is a place where common services are provided. The first requisite is that of a common protection or defense, hence the name from com-munio, without which the occupants could not be secure in any respect, nor could any other common services in freedom be enjoyed. Wealth could not be accumulated personally /?/ and only public works would rise out of the forced labors of myriad serfs and slaves.

 

     Private property in land, so far as it is inviolate, affords an alternative to all this. It accepts the jurisdiction of title conferred upon it publicly and by common insistence and consent. Possession may be seized by force of arms, but title is maintained only by public sentiment and consent. Without that sentiment, security of title cannot be maintained and only insecurity could prevail by force of arms. Private property, maintained by common custom and consent is all that stands for civilized men between the anarchy of unorganized force on the one hand and the tyranny and despotism of organized force on the other, for he who by his own will gives or withholds the gifts of God to men is total master of their lives.