All posts by Bryan Kavanagh

I'm a real estate valuer who worked in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) before co-founding Westlink Consulting, a real estate valuation practice. I discovered, by leaving publicly-generated land rents to be privately capitalised by banks and individuals into escalating land price bubbles, this generates repetitive recessions and financial depressions. We need a tax-switch: from wages, profits and commodities onto economic rents/unearned incomes, if we are to create prosperity and minimise excessive private debt.

NOT BAD!

NOT BAD!

However, the undermining financial bubble which develops during the periods of prosperity needs further analysis. What if these, ever since Ancient Roman times, are always bubbles in land prices which enrich the 1% whilst impovershing much of the rest of the citizenry? Or, as Pliny the Elder foretold–“Latifundia perdidere Italiam“–the great landed estates caused Italy’s destruction.

Maybe we never learn that “The Land Shall Not Be Sold“?

Or, as Henry George demonstrated in his equation, P – R = W + I, if we were to capture land and natural resource rents instead of taxing incomes and purchases, land prices not only disappear but both labour and capital will receive their rightful rewards.

SHE’S GONE!

ANGUS TAYLOR REPLACES SUSSAN LEY AS LEADER OF THE FEDERAL LIBERAL PARTY

Aren’t we fortunate to have a man in control who knows what it’s all about?

Under Barnaby Joyce as minister in 2017, the federal government bought 28 gigalitres of the water rights from Angus Taylor’s Cayman Island company for $80 million–without a competitive tender–and his overseas-based company made a $52 million profit. (His company’s farms, which he’d bought for their water rights, were then sold off separately.)

With Angus’ credentials, when the Australian property market fails, I’m sure that, like Anthony Albanese, he’d want to bail out the Australian people instead of the miscreant banks for their excessive lending!

Am I ….. really?

CORRUPTION

TO A RIGGED TAX REGIME WE MAY NOW ADD UNION CORRUPTION

And surely unions are also compromised in looking after their members’ interests properly when they run superannuation funds, largely invested in real estate?

So, let’s trust the upcoming financial collapse will see political reforms at least the magnitude of those of the Progressive Era.

(And Wiki, the Progressive Era didn’t just take place in the USA. For instance, Australia had land taxes at all three levels of government, the first Labor government having introduced the federal land tax in 1910, ever before the odious income tax was later introduced, and the Australian Capital Territory was set up on a Georgist leasehold system in 1913 to prevent real estate speculation in Canberra.)