Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1510

Carbon of Heath’s letter to Gilbert Tucker, President, Economic Education League, Inc., 128 State Street, Albany, New York, regarding “Progress & Poverty Reviewed and Its Fallacies Exposed”

February 28, 1954

Dear Mr. Tucker:

     It was kind of you to write me and in the kind way that you did in your letter of October 13. Your earlier of May 20 was the last of your two letters to reach me. I reciprocate the spirit in which your first letter especially was written and surely would have acknowledged it with my appreciation.

     I think that upon more thoughtful consideration you would find me more diligent toward the spirit of Henry George’s philosophy of freedom than are those who so strongly adhere to the very letter of his thought. And it is to what you and I both regard as his general argument that I have taken very serious exception.

     It was fundamental with George that freedom depends upon ground rent being the rightful recompense to those who perform necessary public services. Of this basic proposition there can be no doubt. All that can be questioned is the means, and the great question here is: has nature provided that means in the constitution of society or must men resort to legislative and political means to carry out nature’s design? In my view it is imperative that we understand not only her beneficent ends but also the means which nature has provided and continues to provide for the achievement of those ends.

     Nature has given to society an institution that is autonomous in its function of serving society and therefore the less obvious in its beneficence. Men must indeed live from and upon the earth from which they spring. But the different portions of the earth must be separately occupied and held by those who employ it either for their own satisfaction or administratively, as capital is owned, for the service and benefit of others. This means that the sites and resources must be allocated, and this must be done by some authority, either natural and spontaneous or artificial and political. Nature has given us and is evolving a land-owning interest (not even conscious of itself) that is performing this distributive service and thereby saving us from violence and arbitrary discrimina­tions of a political administration. History has well illustrated the basic tyranny of medieval serfdom when administration of the land was in the hands of the political authority — the taxing and war-making power which land owners as such long ago lost.

     As it is now, land owners operate exclusively in the market, and instead of a governing power their selfish instincts impel them to distribute sites and resources into the hands of those who can make them productive, for only such (statistically) can pay the highest price or rent for such service. This is also a protective service, for it is all that stands between the freedom of contrac­tual arrangements and the corruptions of a political distribution of the prime sources and essentials of life.

     The great truth that seems to have escaped George is that there must be an allocation of sites and resources; that this must be done either by the free contractual arrangements of the market or by the arbitrary dispensations of the political power. Like all his contemporaries he had no notion that nature was already employing ground rent in order to obtain this most fundamental of all social requisites, allocation of sites and resources by the social instead of the political process. It is too much to suppose that this vital function could be entrusted to “Our Enemy the State.”

     Henry George was not without a sense of the beneficence of the autonomous society as distinguished from the political organization. In his last volume he wrote of the “laws which are a part of that system or arrange­ment which constitutes the social organism or body economic, as distinguished from the body politic or state … These natural laws … though they may be crossed by human enactment, can never be annulled …”(Sci. Pol. Econ. p. 428). His proposal to legislate the allocation of land into the hands of political authority was not in harmony with this intuition, nor is such means compatible with his great end of ground rent being automatically employed for the recompense of community services. His social watchword was “association in freedom,” but his political watchword was “seize the rent.”

     I hope you will not take it as more harmful for me to point this out, which relates to his general argument, than for you to disclose a sounder explanation of the phenomenon of interest than he did.

     Dear Mr. Tucker, it was always a pleasure to have your acquaintance and to enjoy your conversations and hospitalities, and I am sure we are not very far apart so far as motives and ideals are concerned. It seems only that I am disposed to look further into the part played by land ownership in a free society, and to take rather the view of understanding it than to condemn it and seek to destroy it without such understanding. And property in land is not the first stone that being long despised was found at last to be the highest in the corner of the temple.

     It is only against George’s economic argument for the political administration of rent and land that my criticisms are intended. It is only because of its widespread and misleading influence that it seemed important that its fallacies be exposed. The beauty and the poetry and the spiritual ends envisioned in George’s wider philosophy are noble indeed and deeply appreciated by me. I can only deplore his proposed resort to the iron rule of politics and legislation in place of that higher golden rule, contract and exchange, with which the free societies of men have come more and more to be blessed and endowed.

     With cordial good will I am,

Sincerely yours,

SH:m