Victoria in technical recession. (David Collyer)

Also see Philip Soos’ “A Plague on Aussie Housing“.

This site continues to make the case that land and other natural resource rents constitute between 30% and 50% of any economy and ought to be publicly captured instead of taxing labour and capital – any excess to be distributed equally to all citizens as an annual dividend.

This publicly-generated economic rent is currently permitted to be largely privatised by 0.01% of the population in each country but–due to ignorance of the central fact that rent is a public surplus–the 99.99% have managed to avert their gaze on the matter.

Accordingly, by skirting around the issue of who owns natural resources rents, all socio-political explanations of the developing world economic depression fall short. Once the enormous quantum of rent is understood, most analyses become risible.

As we’ve seen, Norway makes no bones about the issue. In that country, who owns the economic rent has become a dead letter. More clumsily, Chavez has endeavoured to make the point in Venezuela, and big rent-seekers point to his regime as “no model for the free world.”

The privatisation of the public’s rent by the few remains the world’s greatest corruption.

Eurozone unemployment hits 11.8%.

Spain 26.6%. (Yep, that’s right, more than a quarter of work-able Spaniards out of work.)

C’mon guys, wakey wakey!

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Take now… some hard-headed business man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: “Here is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city – in ten years the railroad will have taken the place of the stage coach, the electric light of the candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will in ten years, interest be any higher?” He will tell you, “No!” Will the wages of the common labor be any higher…?” He will tell you, “No the wages of common labor will not be any higher…” “What, then, will be higher?” “Rent, the value of land. Go, get yourself a piece of ground, and hold possession.” And if, under such circumstances, you take his advice, you need do nothing more. You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon or down a hole in the ground; and without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota of wealth to the community, in ten years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious mansion, but among its public buildings will be an almshouse. – Henry George

1.  An economy whereby the 0.01% rips its citizens off, gets them into debt with taxation and land price, pillages natural resources and infrastructure, then totally kills off productive business activity every 18 years.

2.  Georgism, which does none of these.

Why, then, do we choose Option 1?

Maybe it’s less boring having our earnings and leisure time stolen? Just the same, I’d still vote for Option 2, to retain more of my earnings and to have much more time for leisure.

But it seems I remain in a minority.

What if giving people the illusion that buying and owning their own piece of land represents freedom instead acts to put them behind the 8 ball financially?

What if taking on a mortgage with a high land component is like putting your head into a noose?

What if such mortgages put people into a form of wage-slavery as it generates unsustainable bank profits?

What if this is THE systemic fault in the economic system?

How do you address it?

(a)         Ignore it, and hope it goes away, as we do repetitively (each eighteen years in fact)?

(b)         Look at redressing it by charging the land rent, instead of taxation, as in the case of the formation of Australia’s capital city, Canberra?

2103 is the centenary of the founding of Canberra whose land rent system once led the world before it was eventually subverted by real estate interests.

What if a study of Canberra offers a practical response to the global financial crisis?

Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers explain here why Latvia is clearly no model for the world to follow, but we are doing so because the neo-classical economists have been allowed to remain in control of the levers.

Changing from taxing labour and capital to a charge on resource rents is now the only way out of this depression, but no politician, anywhere, has the guts to say so.

That would be a very serious change of the status quo, you see?

But don’t we need a serious change –  instead of continually kicking the can down the road to calamity?

Further from Hudson at Truth-Out.

When I click on the YouTube video, I see FOX have now blocked it on copyright grounds.  Why wouldn’t they?

If you want to know what this scene from the Simpsons was about, it consisted of Montgomery Burns pointing to a generally upward-trending graph with a catastrophic decline at its rightmost extremity.

“If you don’t continue giving all your money to rich people like me”, Mr Burns says pointing to the earlier part of the chart, “we’ll all go over the fiscal cliff like this!” [Pointing to the perpendicular decline at the end of the chart.]

Marx (Karl, not Groucho) was correct in arguing that social change must be founded on a revolution in economics. Any revolution that doesn’t act on this truism must fail, a la Libya, a la Egypt.

Whether or not we perceive it, ‘economics’ simply relates to the way we structure our daily lives and, surely, our financial pages have once again highlighted the egregious mess into which our modern neo-classical economics has been allowed to descend?

By now we should be coming to the realisation that the taxation of labour and capital has us trying to work with both hands tied behind our backs.

Although he may have been well-intentioned in other respects, it was Marx’s economics proved him to be “the prince of muddleheads”.

Meanwhile, largely under the influence of the US-British alliance, the financial system has been permitted to transmogrify from one based upon free enterprise into a plutocracy where privatisation and corporatisation of rents generated from the public’s natural resources has grown apace. (We once used to fund our roads, rail, dams, ports and other infrastructure from these land rents. Remember?)

Marx was getting around to this very point in Book III, but he’d already settled for an attack on capitalism itself instead of on its plutocratic rentiers – the self-serving 0.01%.

The “Occupy” movement is yet to discern this distinctive point, because the minions of the 0.01% have so far been able to downplay the quantum of the economy’s natural resource rent within the economy. Occupy needs to get with the program to capture back our natural resource rents, as argued by Brian Czech. (Czech-Production-Function-and-Henry-George)

So, if we’re looking for a revolution in economics, it’s obvious we don’t look to the 0.01% for assistance. They don’t want to change a system that grants them a free ride on the vast amount of natural resource rents owed to the 99.99%.

Nor do you look to academics. They’ve been insufficiently intellectually rigorous to discern privatisation of the public’s rent has proven to be the knot in the distributional system.

You don’t look to lawyers. They’re occupied dealing with both sides of the question as the system now stands.

Unfortunately, nor can you look to most men. Many of them are concentrating on how they, too, may scramble atop the FIRE sector’s ladder. (FIRE being an acronym for Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.) As we know, FIRE is a good servant but a bad master.

No, those who want a revolution in economics must get on board with those who are the most downtrodden by the current economics, namely, indigenous peoples and women.

Indigenes have always known that the fruits of the land are the basis of any economy and, for this reason, land must never be found in any list of commodities. Land is different and, whilst it may be exclusively occupied, the original inhabitants know it may never really become ‘private property’.

The Right’s apostle of freedom, John Locke, acknowledged the point: “It is in vain in a country whose great fund is land to hope to lay the publik charge on anything else; there at last it will terminate.”

Whilst a few women have successfully elbowed men aside in ascending the ladder of business, most haven’t, either because they didn’t want to join the rat race, because they believe a more cooperative system is possible, or they were defeated by its excesses. Although it may differ in degree, they understand only too well that you don’t have to point overseas to parts of the Muslim world to see how the economic system fails women.

World economies need a grassroots reform. A patchwork of regulation applied to the status quo won’t do it.

There’s a pretty big constituency out there for change. There’s a growing new reality. It’s a matter of getting the proponents together to speak with one voice, because disarray is the friend of the plutocrat.

Women and indigenous people must be at the forefront of the movement, and they should be supported by men of goodwill who realise thoroughgoing economic reform is essential. (In this context, resurrection of the Henry Tax Review becomes a priority.)

But if the movement for economic reform doesn’t cotton onto the crux–that the natural resource rents owed equally to all the people are currently stolen by a handful of parasites (hello, mining interests!)–the necessary revolution is bound not to happen.

I enjoy The Daily Reckoning, insofar as it provides an alternative viewpoint to mainstream analysis.

But its extreme right-wing opinion that there’s no role for government when it comes to business is so Ayn-Randian Right it offers no genuine response to wild-eyed lefties nor to the mainstream. It’s just plain wrong.

The boys at The Daily Reckoning might even have written the screenplay for Atlas Shrugged.  It makes me shudder that these guys could actually be sitting in a theatre nodding their approval at the claptrap that spilled from what must be the worst movie of 2012.

Has it been released here yet? I saw Atlas Shrugged in New York in October and envied my wife for nodding off throughout much of it. How I would have loved to have slept through all that excruciatingly arrant nonsense!

It’s like this guys. Free enterprise is a great thing.  The corporatisation of natural monopolies aint. The ONE thing a government MUST do is to capture the rent of our natural resources instead of taxes, because they are OUR rents – any surplus after necessary government revenue to be distributed to citizens as a dividend.

Leave the operators their profits, but NOT the super-profits which are our natural resource rents.

Otherwise you’ll have the 0.01% continuing to become obscenely rich at the expense of we 99.99%; the 99.99% losing their purchasing power, getting into too much debt, and economies grinding to a halt – like now.

It’s easily fixed, of course. Let’s have true FREE enterprise, sans the plutocrats stealing our natural resource rents, and without self-defeating taxes on labour and capital.

It works.

But I’ll bet the blokes at The Daily Reckoning haven’t caught up with the case for Georgism, or how our economies have long been run by the rent-seeking plutocrats, like banks.

Guys, do yourselves a favour and read this new insightful account by Brian Czech on how we’ve been dudded. It will expand your mind on how our natural monopolies must be treated – if you’re up for it, that is.