OUTGROWING GOVERNMENT AS WE KNOW IT

by Spencer Heath MacCallum

For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind lived with very little change. That is no longer the case. Change is occurring at an accelerating rate, and there is little we can take for granted.

Until very recently it was believed that, if nothing more, death and taxes could be taken for granted. But recent strides in medical and biological science have put the first of those assumptions in doubt. It is at least readily conceivable that, within a few generations, men and women will have the option of living for as long as they care to.

That leaves taxation, an area in which no comparable strides appear to have been made. Yet today I am going to suggest to you that in a like span of time— a few generations— we may see the end of taxation— of all taxes, permanently— and at the same time find ourselves able to support a vastly enlarged level of public administration and community services beyond anything we can now dream.

Space does not permit even touching on the major theoretical underpinnings of this idea, but I am going to present the thought. It may be a new idea to you— and one that you will enjoy thinking about.

There are indications that mankind may be nearing a turning point in societal evolution, a major shift for which the technological and information revolution so far has been preparation and prelude.

That turning point, if it does indeed happen, will be nothing less than the passing away of the political method of administering our cities and towns in favor of purely economic means of providing all of the complex public administration and levels of services a modern urban society demands.

Where is the evidence? It is all around us, and so ordinary and familiar to us that we would not think it anything special. I am speaking of ordinary, everyday things like shopping centers, mobilehome parks, hotels, marinas, office buildings, apartment houses— all ordinary, everyday things we take for granted. But we will see in a moment why these are at the crux of our picture of the turning point.

To pin down precisely what these familiar things I have just named have in common, they are all what are called, in real estate, multiple-tenant income properties (MTIPs). That is, the developed property is not divided up and the pieces sold off for capital gains, as in a condominium development or a subdivision. Rather the whole is kept intact and administered for income by leasing the parts out. Instead of fragmenting the development after its completion, it is maintained in one title and administered as an income property.

For students of societal evolution, two things stand out about MTIPs. One is how recent the phenomenon is, historically speaking. The oldest member of the group, the hotel. dates only back to the Tremont House, which opened in Boston in 1829. The Tremont House, a dramatic departure from its country cousin, the old medieval inn, is universally regarded as marking the beginning of the modern hotel industry.

Apartment houses also date from the nineteenth century but less far back. The first apartment building to be built as such rather than being converted from a preexisting structure is said to have been completed in 1888 near Union Square, Manhattan. I have seen that building, which is probably no longer standing. Office buildings, also, date from around the turn of the century.

But the real growth and development of MTIPs has come in recent decades, and with it many basically new forms have appeared such as marinas, mobilehome parks, motels, medical clinics, shopping centers and malls, office and research parks, and complex mixed-use developments. At the close of World War II there were perhaps a dozen shopping centers in the United States, none more than a small neighborhood convenience facility, and the name itself had yet to be coined. Today, shopping centers in the United States number more than 40,000 and range in size to millions of square feet of gross leaseable space, excluding the common areas such as access ways, parking lots, and malls.

The second intriguing thing about MTIPs, besides their newness, is that they are all communities. We are not used to thinking of them as such, because of their generally small size and specialized nature. Yet there is no denying that they are communities. Consider, for example, any hotel. It has its common areas and its private areas; its corridors are its streets and alleys, while the landscaped lobby is the municipal park and town square. It has shops and restaurants, medical clinics, sometimes chapels. It has its own utilities and security system; it even has public transit, which happens to operate vertically instead of horizontally. Some hotels rank in size with conventional towns and cities. The Hotel Bonaventure in Los Angeles has an overall capacity including conventions approaching 9,000 people, which is fully half the size of the City of Boston at the time the United States won independence from England.

Shopping centers and other MTIPs carry the same principle out-of-doors, differing from hotels and one another mainly by virtue of the different clientele they are specialized to serve.

What each of these communities lacks, however— and this lack sets it apart from all that we habitually think of as communities— is a miniature city hall with tax-collecting authority. All of its community services and facilities are provided contractually, by ordinary business means. The community services earn profits, and hence are self-sustaining. No hotel operates at a chronic deficit, making up that deficit by levies on its guests, as do all conventional towns and cities.

What the developers and managers of these communities are successfully doing is creating and sustaining environments that are so balanced and attractive that people want to live or work there instead of someplace else. Wanting to locate there, they accordingly bid up the rents they are willing to pay— and these rents finance the business.

These are small environments, to be sure. They are micro social environments. But here is a third intriguing thing about MTIPs: the universal trend on the one hand toward greater size, and on the other toward greater complexity from combining many kinds of land uses. MTIPs thus are moving in the direction of becoming communities as we are accustomed to think of communities— all-purpose, generalized communities. Think of the vast implications for this new field of business: public administration as private enterprise.

Thus on all sides we see the small beginnings of a new kind of business in the world— a business that takes human social environment as its concern and rationally manufactures and sustains optimized human environment for potentially enormous return of profit to its investors and satisfactions to its customers.

What is needed to bridge from here to a world of tomorrow in which mankind will have outgrown government as we know it? The answer is, "nothing." It is already happening. The bridge is all around us— in the hundreds of thousands of proprietary communities scattered about our planet like seed crystals. What we do need, however, is to understand it, so that we do not tragically shut, through inappropriate legislation, windows of opportunity that just now may be open to us.

Spencer Heath MacCallum is a theoretical anthropologist and author; he foresees the end of all taxation with a new global order of social stability and individual freedom.

Selected Bibliography on the Proprietary Community

Foldvary, Fred

1994 Public Goods and Private Communities: The Market Provision of Community Services. A Publication of the Locke Institute. Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Edgar Publishing Company.

Heath, Spencer

1936 Politics Versus Proprietorship. Published by the author. 1957 Citadel, Market and Altar: Emerging Society. Baltimore: The Science of Society Foundation

Howard, Ebenezer

1898 Tomorrow:A Peaceful Path to Real Reform London: Swann Sonnenschein

Levy, David

1975 "Learning Economics from Walt Disney World" Reason Magazine, October

MacCallum, Spencer H.

1964 "The Social Nature of Ownership" Modem Age, Vol. 9, No. 1, Winter The Art of Community Menlo Park, California: The Institute for Humane Studies "Jural Behavior in American Shopping Centers" Human Organization Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 1972 "Associated Individualism: A Victorian Dream of Freedom" Reason Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 1995 "Outgrowing Government As We Know It": Revision of an unpublished talk given at Town Hall of California, 1984. The Heather Foundation, Box 21, Pine Hill, New Mexico. 1995 "Drafting a Constitution for Orbis: The Business of Providing Community Services in Outer Space" The Heather Foundation, Box 21, Pine Hill, New Mexico.

Riegel, Edwin C.

1978 Flight From Inflation: The Monetary Alternative San Pedro, California: The Heather Foundation, Box 21, Pine Hill, New Mexico.

The Heather Foundation is dedicated to furthering the understanding of society as an evolving natural phenomenon of spontaneously patterned cooperation among freely-acting individuals. Taxation and other institutionalized coercions are viewed as evidence of insufficient development of social organization, a condition to be outgrown.

The Foundation sponsors research, lectures and publications. It also preserves and administers the intellectual estates of persons who contributed notably to the humane studies. Areas of focus include philosophy of science; the inspirational aspect of religion and the aesthetic arts; monetary theory and alternative money systems; and the institution of property-in-land in relation to community organization. The Heather Foundation, Box 21, Pine Hill, NM 87357. phone: (505) 775-3750.