V.

TRICKLE-UP

Taxes generate deadweight losses.

Land rents don’t. They funds abundance and prosperity.

…. by paying its rent and untaxing labour and capital.

The result? Real wealth creation, prosperity and a decent universal income!

And an end to boom-bust as “the natural business cycle“.

Click

How many people and organisations in Australia are involved in ‘raising funds’ for numerous good causes? It must be in the thousands.

How many of these would be unnecessary if Australia had a universal income?

All of the trials around the world have shown that a universal income does not have recipients sitting around doing nothing: Quite the contrary!

Nor is it inflationary, as delivery of a universal income is an immediate and direct deduction from currently stolen economic rents.

Yes, we’ll probably need to wait for another financial crisis to consider a universal income. So, let’s trust we do so with vigour when that opportunity arises!

When not one Australian politician is today prepared to say what our longest-serving Prime Minister, Robert Gordon Menzies, said (above) just before the Great Depression, we have a major problem.

Land prices are the private capitalisation of publicly generated land rent, and the national accounts (ABS Catalogue 5204 Table 61) shows that they have exploded to more than $10 trillion dollars, representing $375,000 for every man, woman and child in Australia.

We clearly need to be capturing more land rent publicly.

Where’s the politician who correctly sees land prices as the fundamental driver of inflation and entirely antithetical to productivity (eh, Productivity Commission)?

Are they silent on it because most of them are, like many Australians, commodifying land, ‘investing’, for their own retirement? The practice of Australians pumping land prices more than any other nation presents a grave threat to the country.

Poliricians self-justification: “Wouldn’t speaking out on the pumping of land values offend many people, and banking, real estate and media interests who leverage off property speculation? We can’t do that!“

So, onward we roll, into the next financial depression, as our gigantic bubble in land prices bursts.

____oooOooo____

David Brooks suggests people’s inner resentment has generated the outward hostility that we’re now experiencing, and that repair will follow the social rupture.

I doubt Brooks sees that he’s describing our descent into economic depression but agree that the outcome will be to our advantage; eventually.

Let’s trust that it will be akin to the 1898 to 1920 period, a new Progressive Era, where we come to see the need to capture rents instead of taxing our incomes and purchases, where we’ve taxed ourselves into impossible levels of private debt.

As we failed to see this at the 1930s depression, it may be that the wheel has turned in our favour and the times are once more with us.

Meanwhile, if inner resentment means outward hostility, things certainly aren’t looking good for incumbent governments.