THE FRENCH KNOW HOW TO RIOT ….

…. BUT THEY FAIL TO FOLLOW THE PHYSIOCRATS’ ADVICE, UNFORTUNATELY.

The French are out in the streets again!

They may celebrate their Revolution, but the French never really ‘got it’.

Thomas Paine understood the economic advice of the French Physiocrats (via Nicolas de Condorcet) but stupid revolutionaries had him sent to jail, and headed for death, despite his support for the revolution.

It’s not just budget cuts, guys, it’s debt, taxes and land prices doing you in – as elsewhere in the west. And your Physiocrats had the answer: To experience abundance and prosperity, you need to tax land prices away and un-tax everything else!

Why not get it right this time?

NOT AGAIN, PLEASE SPEARSIE!

David Spears silly questions of Treasurer Jim Chalmers continue on the ABC’s Insiders this morning: “Why aren’t you delivering a surplus budget?”

Such is overwhelming ignorance on deficit budgets being essential if economies are to be healthy, that Chalmers appears to accept the premise, saying he has previously delivered a surplus, since made great budgetary savings and also cut taxes. He dissembles: “Where are the additional cuts to come from?“

Realities expressed by the 1996 Nobel prize winner in economics, William Vickery, to the effect that surplus budgets commonly lead to recessions, are once again ignored: We must uphold the failed neoliberal approach that has brought the world to dire economic straits.

REASONS V. REAL REASONS

It was a relatively small group of people who forecast the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. To those supporters of Henry George nominated by the late great Mason Gaffney, I would certainly add the name of Philip J Anderson.

Have you noticed on this occasion, however, that many people have emerged from the woodwork to forecast the upcoming economic collapse? It’s becoming obvious, even to Austrians, libertarians and some neoclassical economists who entertain the belief that the upcoming financial collapse is the result of government spending, or of “too much money chasing too few goods”.

Wrong! It’s the same old, same old collapse of land prices that has been pumped over centuries by banking, real estate and media interests.

Although Catherine Cashmore’s excellent paper for Prosper Australia explains the 18-year cycle in land prices, powerful interests would have us believe these crashes are the result of “too much money”.

Well, yes: Too much money spent on land prices and on arbitrary taxation!