This piece by Tony O’Brien is well worth a re-run on the benefits of replacing taxes with economic rents.
All posts by Bryan Kavanagh
THE IMPORTANCE OF A FORMULA
CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
MacroBusiness’ Rumplestatskin provides an excellent review of Thomas Piketty’s popular new book.
WA REAL ESTATE PRES CALLS FOR LAND TAX TO REPLACE STAMP DUTY
“VERITAS”?
Q: How many people get out of Harvard knowing the singlemost truth: rent-seeking in land acts to destroy economies? (I known of one Australian who made it.)
EXPERTS SPEAK ON HOUSING BUBBLES
QUESTIONS
What do we do when we’re ill? Don’t we usually take measures to get ourselves better?
Then why don’t we seek serious remedies when the economy is ill, as it so obviously is at the moment?
What wrong with us that we battle on carrying this economic illness, this fiscal pathology? Surely, it’s akin to working with one hand tied behind our backs?
Do we believe our politicians and economists when they tell us there are no easy answers? If so, are we stupid, are our mental processes lazy, or what?
Do we think the Australian budget in May will address the ongoing economic distress?
These questions require honest answers.
“I’m not an economist” is no answer. In fact, being an economist will prove to be a handicap in responding to these questions, unless of course you’re heterodox.
SLAVERY, STILL?
Robinson Crusoe, as we all know, took Friday as his slave. But suppose that instead of taking Friday as his slave, Robinson Crusoe had welcomed him as a man and a brother, had read him a Declaration of Independence, an Emancipation Proclamation and a Fifteenth Amendment, and informed him that he was a free and independent citizen, entitled to vote and hold office, but had at the same time had also informed him that that particular island was his (Robinson Crusoe’s) private and exclusive property. What would have been the difference? Since Friday could not fly up into the air, nor swim off through the sea, since if he lived at all he must live on the island, he would have been in one case as much a slave as in the other. Crusoe’s ownership of the island would have been equivalent to his ownership of Friday.
Chattel slavery is, in fact, merely the rude and primitive mode of property in man. It only grows up where population is sparse. It never, save by virtue of special circumstances, continues where the pressure of population gives land a high value, for in that case the ownership of land gives all the power that comes from the ownership of men, in more convenient form. When in the course of history, we see the conquerors making chattel slaves of the conquered, it is always where population is sparse and land of little value, or where they want to carry off their human spoil. In other cases, the conquerors merely appropriate the lands of the conquered, by which means they just as effectually, and much more conveniently, compel the conquered to work for them.
– Henry George, Social Problems, Chapter 15, “Slavery and Slavery”
HOW “THE ECONOMIST” BACKSLID
“BIG FOUR” DILEMMA LOOMS …
THE AGE asks some searching questions today about Australia’s big four banks.
“Should the major banks pay for a bailout that may never be needed?”
Never be needed? We tend to forget that the Bank of South Australia and the State Savings Bank of Victoria are no more, following the 1989 peak of the commercial bubble – and that Westpac clung on to life only by the skin of its teeth after the ensuing 1991 recession.
The Australian residential property bubble which has developed since the late 1990s dwarfs by orders of magnitude the late 1980s commercial/industrial bubble, so it’s obviously wishful thinking by Australian banks that there’s no imminent emergency. The banks’ complicity in repetitively inflating land price bubbles which always burst is akin to the fiscal irresponsibility of Popeye’s friend, Wimpy. Will any of them be able to survive this one? You be the judge.
