It was pretty well a full house of more than 200 people at Cinema Nova’s presentation of Kane Guglielmi’s movie “Common Wealth” last night.
What an excellent excursion into how the Australian tax regime might be remedied to draw our increasingly nonsensical political bifurcation back together!
If you get an opportunity to see the movie, take it folks!
Xi Jinping tried to address it by proposing a national property tax in October 2021: “Housing is for living, not for speculation“, but was fiercely opposed by the Party.
Seems property speculators run the show in any system?
But the dark web has subsequently taken control of my Twitter (X) account, @bryankav123. …. 🙁
Hmmmm …. funny about that?
We do have alternatives: –
1. We can continue with economies whereby the 0.01% rips off its citizenry by ‘financialising’ them into impossible levels of debt, using escalating land prices and the taxing of their sales and earnings.
2. Or, we could adopt Georgism, which does none of these whilst also distributing a universal citizens’ dividend.
Perhaps we don’t know of the second option?
[Australians used to know. We had land ‘taxes’–actually rents–at all three levels of government during most of the Progressive Era (1897 to 1920) – before succumbing to having our earnings taxed.]
oooOooo
And you’re quite correct about the stupidity of government borrowing, Fred Harrison! Henry George had thoughts on that sort of nonsense, too: –
oooOooo
And, come the crunch, maybe addressing the need for a universal income can get Georgist ideas over the line? After all, it is an immediate and direct deduction from currently stolen rents!
As Henry George said in his The Crime of Poverty speech: –
That’s why the world needs to consider employing the VIMMLBUTT package at this incredibly threatening juncture.
Gold bugs have a point. An ounce of gold bought a high-quality outfit in Ancient Rome, just as it buys an excellent suit today. As gold’s actual value remains steady, its enormously rising price highlights the massive inflation and currency devaluation that has occurred over many generations.
But the bugs are wrong in simply ascribing the devaluation of fiat currencies to governments “printing too much money”. Yes, fiat currencies do have a habit of disappearing to zero, but it’s for reasons other than excessive governmental spending.
In modern economies, commercial banks create over 90% of the money supply through lending; not governments. Much of this money goes into funding the price of land. Once it’s seen that land prices represent the private capitalisation of publicly-generated rent, we’ll understand that land prices are the very essence of inflation; as are taxes upon our sales and earnings.
Whilst modern economists and commentators find this terrain too difficult to cross, returning to Ancient Rome, we find that Edward Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” touches upon the latifundia’s unequal distribution of land and the role of oppressive taxation in Rome’s decline, unfortunately without understanding this aspect of inflation to be integral to the collapse of every empire.
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Of course, this was just before the last financial depression.
It’s both land prices and taxes; they dispossess the many for the few, but only a relative handful of social commentators espy this fact. This website pays tribute to these seers.
We might have rampant prosperity: i.e. zero land prices and zero taxes, and a very decent universal income—were we to tax land rents away (in the wider sense of all natural resource rents, including Big Tech rents), instead of taxing our incomes and sales.
Just think! Land prices and taxes. Gone!
Signifying that the only certainties in life are death and rent; not death and taxes!
Housing is flat-out unaffordable. Politicians love talking about “affordable housing,” but can we actually achieve it without house prices dropping? No, not a chance.
Instead, politicians dodge this reality by claiming that simply building more homes will solve the problem. Will it? No. Why would developers willingly lower their prices?
Acquisition of the land drives residential development costs. It accounts for some 80% of an Australian home’s total price, and builders are obviously unable to discount this market reality.
However, replacing existing taxes with a universal land tax holding charge for all property owners—not just investors—would radically shift the market.
We avoid this solution simply because it works. It would trigger a sharp decline in land values and make housing genuinely affordable.
Failing political intervention, the real estate bubble will crash again on its usual nine- and eighteen-year schedules. Occasionally, these standard recessions deepen into full economic depressions, as discovered by Nikolai Kondratieff.
It should go without saying that generating a financial depression is a terrible way to achieve affordable housing.
