Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1034

Three pages typed by Heath

1930s?

 

 

WHAT IS ECONOMIC SCIENCE?

Knowledge of Relationships

 

 

All science is discovery. Discovery is knowledge. Knowledge is power.

 

     Science is not a relief or escape; it is an illumination. It has no problems of peace or war. It is the ongoing and outreaching of the mind into light. It weighs and measures, systematizes experience by experiment. Thus grows in the minds of men patterns and processes that correspond with the structures that exist and the changes found uniformly to occur in the outer, in the objective world.

 

     Science first discovers the limitations of things. It thus has definitions and puts things in classes, according to their limitations. It next discovers the relations of and between things. This process is discerned in structure; time is united to space.

 

     Science deals with things and their relationships in space and time, with structures and changes, as they resemble and repeat themselves. There are sciences that deal with structure and process in the individual man — anatomy, physiology, etc. There are sciences that deal with the not-man, the environment, the structures and processes whence man is derived — astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, etc. There are yet to be the sciences dealing with men in association, with the social structures and their pro­cesses which, taken together, will constitute the Science of Society.

 

     One of these nascent social sciences is Economics. It deals with the structures (or groupings, institutions) of men and the processes among and between them — their exchanges of energies in service forms, that is, in acceptable and reciprocal forms.

Now just as the life of man must take on a physical form, so must the life of a society, the service energies of men, be performed by the aid or use of and wrought into physical things. These things before being so transformed are called land. After they have been in any degree so altered or transformed, they are called wealth or, more properly, capital. When the services incorporated in these things are no longer being exchanged, then these artificial things cease to be capital. And when all the services that have been wrought into them have gone out of them either by use or by decay, consumption or waste, then they cease not only to be capital but even to be wealth. As they were land before, so they become land again.

 

     Now to have a social existence, a societal life form, with power to transform and thus exercise dominion over the earth (the land), in order to cease being merely the creatures and to become the creators of their world to the image of their desires and dreams, men must cease to wander and consume and destroy, and begin to create. To do this, they must attach themselves to a portion of the earth and convert it into a community. This means that they must so arrange themselves with respect to each other that a portion of their territory may become their common means of unmolested communication, association and exchange with each other. This takes the form of a street or road and a public or market place lying along and between the borders of their privately held lands. They designate special persons as public officers to take jurisdiction over and ensure equal and peaceable opportunity to use the public parts of the community.

In like manner, they make an arrangement among themselves for the equal opportunity of all, and upon equal terms, to have peaceable use and possession of the nonpublic parts of the territory. Invariably it is the popular will to do this by accepting those persons first in possession of locations, sites and resources as the necessary officers for effecting all further transfers of possession. These persons are given a formal investiture of title with authority to resist force, but to practice none but the contractual relations of contract and consent concerning further transfers or distribution either of the land outright, or of its limited use, and these proprietary officers receive in rents and “increments” such compensation for their service of social distribution as the common will, under the equal democracy of the marketplace, awards.

 

     The things of nature in a community can no more be distributed by fear and favor, force and fraud, than can the things of art. When they cannot be allocated to the most productive persons — to those who can offer most — by the peaceful technique of contract and consent, then they cannot be securely or productively held and their use and value both disappear. But under the contractual allocation …

 

 

                                           /Breaks off/