Property and Its Productive Administration: Servant of the Creative Spirit in Man
Servant of the Creative Spirit in ManWhat is CAPITAL?
Spiritual — creative — self-developing — organic
Property can be consumed, destroyed, and (more…)
Untitled Item from the Spencer Heath Archive
When my grandfather, Spencer Heath, died in 1963, now almost fifty years ago, I had the good sense to gather up all of his writings, a good bushel basket full of mostly penciled notes, jottings in lined tablets and on the back of envelopes. Gradually over a period of months I transcribed them uniformly by typewriter, in no particular order, numbering each as I went. The final tally was just over 2,000 items, now called the Spencer Heath Archive.
Subsequently, at the suggestion of Donald H. Allen (a long-time colleague of Galambos), Alvin Lowi studied and annotated several hundred items. These he pulled more or less randomly since there was no organization to the cartons of typed sheets, looking for ones relating to the philosophy of science. For although Heath had never published on that subject, he valued his discoveries in that area more highly, even, than his contributions to voluntaryist social organization. Years later, in 1998, Lowi authored “The Legacy of Spencer Heath,” intended as a forward for a contemplated new edition of Heath’s Citadel, Market and Altar. In the Summary of that essay, he wrote, (more…)
Quickening of Social Evolution
THE QUICKENING
OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION
Negotiating the Last Rapids, Perhaps
Spencer Heath MacCallum
The Independent Review
A Journal of Political Economy
Vol. II No. 2 (Fall 1997) (Revised by the author 2011)
The Quickening of Social Evolution
Spencer Heath MacCallum
Years ago I read a translation, supposedly true, of an early Egyptian sequence of hieroglyphs that said in effect that the world was going to the dogs. After listing a number of lamentations, including the disobedience of young people and how they no longer respected their elders, it ended with the observation that “everybody’s trying to write a book.” (more…)
The Somali Way: Rule of Law without the State
The Law of the Somalis, by Michael van Notten, is a landmark book. See a review of it: (www.amazon.com/Law-Somalis-Foundation-Economic-Development/product-reviews/156902250X/ref=sr_1_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 It is a pioneering study of one of the world’s half-dozen great legal systems. The author, a Dutch legal scholar (and voluntaryist), married into Somalia’s fifth largest clan, the Samaron, and lived the last dozen years of his life with his adoptive kinsmen, taking full advantage of that unique opportunity to study Somali politics and customary law. The book is the first study of (more…)
Miracle of Mata Ortiz
THE MIRACLE OF MATA ORTIZ
Here are some YouTube pictures of my involvement, 1976-present, with the village of Mata Ortiz, Chihuahua, Mexico. They were put together for the occasion of the University of Juárez recognizing my promotion of tourism in the region. But the story has to do with the village itself, which in 1976 was desperately poor and fast becoming a ghost town. At best, the villagers raised some beans and corn, and grazed some animals on unfenced mountain range. It was remote, without even a graded road to it and, because of this, (more…)
Enterprise of Community
The Enterprise of Community
Here is one of my most important papers, originally published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies (Vol. 17 No. 4 / Fall 2003). Inspired by the work of Spencer Heath, it explains the close relationship between land and environmental concerns. But it addresses a further question: whether common, community needs might not be handled entrepreneurially just as our private and individual needs are today.
This idea that communities as such might be operated entrepreneurially is uncomfortable for many libertarians, and I was long puzzled as to why. (more…)
VOLUNTARIA
SpontaneousOrderDotCom.WordPress.com
We’ve chosen to call our first offering on this blogsite “Voluntaria,” inspired by Princess Nirvana Goes to Voluntaria, the most recent in the “Princess Nirvana” book series by James L. Payne. An excerpt from the book will appear in Carl Watner’s [www.voluntaryist.com] forthcoming anthology, Taxation: Essays in Opposition (Apple Valley, CA: Cobden Press [www.fr33.com]). With permission from Carl and Jim, the excerpt appears here as our first-ever blog. Though written for adults, children stand to benefit from this exercise as well. Princess Nirvana goes to Voluntaria would seem (more…)
