Spencer Heath Archive

Item 514.

No date

TO NON-LAND-OWNERS

To you these ideas seem reactionary — a looking back to aristocratic forms. This is because you think in terms of form instead of action or function. You think of government as a restraint and not as a service.

You do not like it. It sounds aristocratic — and it is — aristocracy of service, services at a price fairly earned and fully paid. If important services are to be performed we should have service by the best, and the best servants are those who, exchanging freely, get the best pay because they give the best services.

Land owners as owners and administrators of the public property and services can get no revenue except by making the public services so good that they sell for more than they cost and thus recompense them for their administration of them. Dependent upon rent (not taxes) for their revenue, they must give such public services as are of most aid to production and so help to create their own market — the demand and the wherewithal to pay for them. Good public services will always increase their revenues from rent; bad services will always destroy them. Nor can (without taxes) land owners ever become a political caste. Those whose services create less rents will always be selling out to those whose public services can create more, and the wages and profits of tax-free private industries will always draw out of land ownership and public service all of those persons whose administrative services are more socially valuable in the other fields.

What about democracy? Democracy implies relations of freedom and consent. There is no way to seize property democratically, whatever the form under which it is done.

Property can be administered democratically by those who own and derive their revenues from the same property by parliamentary procedure at owners’ meetings. And property can be exchanged democratically among those who own different kinds of properties by the democratic procedure of an open market where all persons may call out (or vote in writing) their wishes and desires as to the rates upon which they will redistribute among themselves their wealth and services. Such democracy is spontaneous, non-coercive and self-executing. Its decrees require no enactment, no enforcement and no judicial review.

A public service (government) administered by land owners will practice the democracy of common ownership in their own councils and procedures among themselves. And it will prac­tice the universal democracy of the market…