If you understand that if we fail to capture the rent of all our natural resources for revenue, all progress becomes capitalised into land prices instead of fairly distributed, then you are an economist of the highest order.

Financial and real estate interests prefer the existing pathology which allows them to create loans and debt on escalating land prices but, of course, they should be serving people and society instead of repetitively generating financial collapse.

“Latifundia perdidere Italiam” – Pliny the Elder

[Approx translation: The rent-seeking one per cent killed off Ancient Rome, just as surely as they will Pax Americana. ]

It’s surely akin to Gina Rinehart’s?

This is why the current budget is aimed at ripping the heart out of Australia’s poor and middle class – so our miners, banks, and others in the one per cent club, can escape paying Australia their fair contribution.

What was that I was saying about human rights? (There is no longer such a thing.)

MIKE MALONEY –>  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tctS_vAxNOg

http://www.grputland.com/2014/06/buy-up-australia-fair.html

Antipodean warrior Bob Keall (website) was in Melbourne this week to put a proposal before he returned today to New Zealand.

Some historical background

Veteran Georgist Keall was mentored amongst others by surgeon the late Rolland O’Regan, author of “Rating in New Zealand” (1973) and scion of Patrick Joseph O’Regan, former NZ Labour member for Buller, later a judge of the Arbitration Court, and supporter of the ideas of Sir George Grey.

New Zealand having been partly settled on the principles espoused by convicted kidnapper and land dealer Edward Gibbon Wakefield, namely, that land be sold at “sufficient price” to keep workers servile, George Grey, as a great supporter of the ideas of Henry George, proved to be Wakefield’s (and many others’) nemesis – as evidenced in this particular biography.

Keall enunciates his proposal

Bob Keall believes, now the bifurcation between the major political parties has been set in concrete, politicians are incapable of dealing with essential reform of the economy. Therefore the Georgist case must be taken out of politics and brought before the law. There, on the grounds of a breach of human rights, the claim of the public to their resource rents may be made in the courts. New Zealand could be the crucible.

I think Bob Keall is onto something. I’m sure it can be shown that private rent-seeking in the public’s revenue stream (economic rent) is the process by which many billionaires are being created out of the impoverishment of all others.

Tomas Piketty, the IMF and  and many others have documented the rapidly-growing disparities in wealth around the world. Let the courts decide whether private rent-seeking is indeed the mechanism for this phenomenon, and whether it breaches the human right of all of us to our natural resource rents.

Maybe with a bit further work the idea could be fostered by a Change.org petition and a legal case eventually mounted by crowd-funding and support from philanthropists?

I reckon this idea could be a real goer.

…. being considered by China.

And I was happy to hear Joseph Stiglitz recommend we Australians appropriate our share of the mining rents at the end of his interview with Jon Faine on ABC Radio 774 this morning.  (What do you think of that, Gina?)

Even Iran–the West’s new found friend?–captures its oil rents.

The New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) is being run into the ground dealing with high-level crime in the state, whether it be union heavies stealing members’ funds, corrupt deals between members of the Labor Party, or private/public partnerships (PPP) seeking to privatise natural monopolies such as water supply, and bribing members of both Labor and Liberal parties to secure self-interested ends.

ABC’s Four Corners documented the Australian Water Holdings affair last night in all its sickening detail.

The corruption isn’t contained within New South Wales (NSW), of course. And let’s not simply get tied up with all the personalities involved, because there is principle involved. What’s happening is indicative of a malady taking hold in Australia in the name of ‘privatisation’ and ‘private enterprise’.

Today, few people accept the principle that provision of natural monopoly services such as roads, freeways, railways, water, gas, electricity and the airwaves must be run publicly, whilst all else ought to be private enterprise. We’ve been brainwashed to believe that government has little other than a regulatory role in such matters.

The Australian Water Holdings (AWH) affair should be salutary. This was a PPP that partially privatised water. The NSW government was grossly overcharged for AWH’s services, and part of the ill-gotten proceeds was used to bribe parliamentarians to further AWH’s interests.

Lessons?

1. When there are public economic rents to be had, watch out! When individual politicians or political parties can make a dollar out of privatising these rents, watch out!  Parasitic leeches are waiting.

2. There is clearly an enormous amount of patronage and crime being generated out of political donations in Australia. The parties ought be publicly funded and private donations banned.

3. PPPs ought also be banned, and natural monopolies must come back into public ownership.

4. There is no place for anyone but the public capturing Australia’s economic rents.