Spencer Heath Archive

Item 130

Penciled by Heath on notepad paper at Chicago, Illinois.

January 3, 1945

     There are two kinds of public authority — authority to rule and authority to serve. The one comes from conquest by or voluntary surrender to a power that lays tribute or taxes and thus progressively infringes the freedom of those ruled to own property and to exchange properties and services by free contract and consent. Practice of such power and coercive authority, if without successful opposition, is called government. Any benefits conferred by it are by favor and grace and hence privileges (private laws) not to the service of but detrimental to the public so coerced and ruled.

     The authority to serve comes not from conquest or surrender but from the cessation of violence against persons and the acceptance thereby of their authority to make contracts, one with another, with respect to their properties and services on behalf of others by exchange — agreed and measured recompenses. Service arises from the recognition of ownership and the practice thereby of free contract and exchange. Service commands voluntary recompense and thereby suspends rulership — coercion and force.

     Coercion and contract, rulership and service, are mutually exclusive. They are the sole alternatives. Extension of the one is the abrogation of the other. There is no third relationship. Rulership, coercion, infringes ownership and this inhibits contract and exchange — the services that suspend force by commanding voluntary recompenses. There is no abandonment (abrogation) of force but by the practice of exchange.

     Society is the opposite of slavery. So far as men do not own themselves — their services, products and properties — they are slaves. They cannot make contracts; they cannot exchange — serve and be served. Society is not a mere mass or accumulation of men. It is a system of interfunctioning men — of reciprocal services by ownership, contract and exchange. A population escapes slavery and exists as a society only to the extent that it thus functions. Among hermits, savages and slaves there are no exchange relationships. They may possess but not own; and they possess by excluding others, for self-service, not for the use and service of others by contract and exchange. Ownership, in the social sense, is not physical or forcible possession but by common consent. It is the necessary foundation of all contracts, all service by exchange. It is a kind of free jurisdiction over one’s person and powers and one’s properties and products. It is not a mere condition but an active or potential administration on behalf of others. Possession for one’s own use — without administration for others — involves no social relationships, does not differ essentially from barbaric possession. Only in a society are there any capital properties or goods.

     Every contract, every exchange, has parties and subject-matter. The subject-matters are either or both services and properties. Services are of two kinds: Services of production, that change things physically; services of distribution, that change nothing but the ownership, the jurisdiction, the relationship existing between the parties with respect to the subject-matter things. All the services of production are physical, those of exchange social. Both services have value and are recompensed at the point and in the act of exchange. But properties that have not been produced — physically changed — are still subject to ownership and distribution by exchange. In each case the value received for them or their use is the recompense for the purely social service of distributing them by the social and non-coercive process of ownership, contract and exchange.¹³⁰