Today’s address by Greens Senator Christine Milne to the National Press Club was everything a political address should be.

“An economy that serves people and nature” was big picture stuff.  It was positive, relevant, informative, and offered the nation an optimistic outlook where peoples’ happiness should be included as a national criterion.

If the latter sounds like a typical ‘motherhood’ political statement, it wasn’t.  It was well supported by plenty of policy detail – including the need to shift the tax system towards Ken Henry’s aspirations for Australia’s future tax system.

“Oh, but they can say these high-minded things because they’re unlikely to attain political power in their own right!” doesn’t quite cut it any longer when Milne painted such a all-encompassing picture, so markedly different from that of the Labor and Liberal parties.

That the Greens are having their programs costed also sets them and Labor apart from the Libs. [Wha …! Greens having their policies costed now?]

Maybe Milne’s address–no doubt to be nit-picked by nihilist journos in tomorrow’s newspapers–might even herald a long-awaited change from the major parties. [Michele Grattan, unable to resist dropping the tag “frustrating party” on the Greens, was handled well in response by the Green’s leader.]

Instead of abuse and game-playing, a bit of vision from all parties, as expounded today by Christine Milne, would go a long way with Australia’s voters, if not its media commentators.

And so it continues: the Left not knowing how taxes to which they’ve attached themselves like Ahab to Moby Dick have created this financial collapse; the Right believing that if any government revenue at all is necessary, it must only be used to fight ‘wars of liberation’ in foreign countries. Neither these, nor anything else, the latter say, should be funded from publicly-generated land values.

Modern political discussion has become hopelessly enmeshed in this great and unnecessary divide between aspirations for personal freedom and those who believe there is a necessary role for government.

It should be obvious that society can tolerate neither rampant personal freedoms which impinge on the freedoms of others and on good order, nor dictatorial governments propounding never-ending cases for hostility and war. But it’s obviously not obvious.

Though the American philosopher Henry George showed there’s a middle ground between these polar opposites, we divide ourselves more than ever by the pointless bifurcation.

The 0.1% is quite happy with this arrangement.  Under the cloak of such ignorance it will continue to divide, rule and prosper at society’s expense.

Proponents of liberty would do well to consider whether any freedom can be possible when a knot in our distributional system clearly favours less than 0.1% of the population.

Similarly, those who acknowledge there is indeed a role for government should understand that it must not be funded—or stolen—from the earned incomes of labour or capital.

Once it’s understood that the unearned income from land—known by economists as rent— is sufficient to replace taxation at all levels of government, the means of reconciling both freedom and a necessary level of government for the harmonious running of society should become apparent to all.

Unfortunately, however, too few realise there is this middle ground.

In such an educational void, economic depression and the ensuing social upheaval must continue to settle across the globe as a permanent feature.

The solution patiently awaits recognition.    ______________________________________

“THERE come moments in our lives that summon all our powers — when we feel that, casting away illusions, we must decide and act with our utmost intelligence and energy. So in the lives of peoples come periods specially calling for earnestness and intelligence.
We seem to have entered one of these periods. Over and again have nations and civilizations been confronted with problems which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, not to answer was to be destroyed; but never before have problems so vast and intricate been presented. This is not strange. That the closing years of this century must bring up momentous social questions follows from the material and intellectual progress that has marked its course.”
 
– Henry George, Social Problems

TODAY’S MAIL

I’m a bit slow at times.

I was half way through this Warning I received today from ASIC, ACC, Victoria Police and Australia Post before I realised they weren’t talking about our superannuation funds.

Haven’t they invested many billions of our money, too, and ‘lost’ much of it in the process?

If this is providing for my future, give me the 9% of my wages my employer sets aside in a ‘super’ fund for me. I could put it in a bank with a slightly better degree of safety–or have much more fun losing it myself–than paying private superannuation funds big-time to lose so much of it for me.

I expect working Americans have achieved much the same results with their 401k, except they’ve been ‘scammed’: we’ve been ‘rorted’.

It’s strange world.

I guess there are official rorts, like the taxing of labour and capital, or retirement plans, then there are the sort of non-official rorts referred to in today’s letter.

Here’s the link to the game.

Parallel speeches (except at the end!) are a great  giggle.   🙂

MITT ROMNEY EXPERIENCES AN ATTACK OF ‘THE JOE HOCKEYS’

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.

All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.

That that’s an entitlement.

And the government should give it to them.

And they’re hopeless.

I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

– Mitt Romney, as captured on film by “Mother Jones”

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COMMENT

This 0.1% of the population, billionaires, captures the greater part of our publicly-generated land and natural resource rents.

Although it’s theft, they seem to believe they are entitled to it.

They did not earn it, it is ours – owed equally to each one of us.

Get it?  We are all entitled, equally, to the land and resource rents of the nation stolen by these billionaires.

But billionaires in their most incredibly distorted sense of entitlement believe it’s theirs – theirs alone.

Proof?  Just try to legislate for the common wealth, the annual unearned value of land and resources, to be shared equally by ALL citizens !  [Listen to the screams! It’s theirs! They are entitled!]

Billionaires are unable to see their particular ‘entitlement’ is sick-making–far worse than the so-called ‘entitlement’ of the poor–because their entitlement creates poverty, dispossession and crime – and they are unable to admit to these crimes.

It’s the Mitt Romneys of this world are hopeless.  They are parasites.

INCOME TAX, THEN DAYLIGHT

Dr Gavin Putland, Director of the Land Values Research Group has given Australia’s iniquitous revenue sourcing a graphical perspective.

In theory, income tax sounds very progressive, doesn’t it?  It’s sorely abused however – and not simply by using smart lawyers and accountants.  If you’re a mega-wealthy landowner, you will claw back every cent you’ve ever paid in income tax via the uplift in your land values – i.e. on the back of the public’s rent that you’ve been able to privatise.

Are renters able to offset their taxes in this way?  Can the middle class do this?  Is the rent of our land grotesquely under-taxed?

I’ll let you ponder the answer to those questions for yourself.

While land value-rating municipalities continue to distort their rating base with minimum rates, effectively subsidising the owners of more valuable land, and capital improved value rating municipalities penalise construction, and states at the same time underutilise their land-taxing powers–and both these levels of Australian government continue to put their hands out to the federal government for assistance–there can surely be no greater advertisement than Dr Putland’s chart for implementing the recommendations of the Henry Tax Review for an all-in federal tax?

Hearing Gary Shearston sing “She’s a Classic” on Ian McNamara’s Australia All Over this morning reminded me of the Australian folk music revival at the outset of the 1960s in which Shearston loomed large.

Mates of mine formed a group particularly influenced by the Ivy League-shirted Kingston Trio at the time. They were raw but very good.

“Macca” himself was in good form this morning, regretting that strong public dissent at China and others buying up large slabs of Australia isn’t matched by any real concern from the Fairfax or Murdoch press – or the major political parties.

He interviewed Clare McShane from Oatlands, a small country town between Launceston and Hobart in Tasmania who is struggling to continue manufacturing quality woolen textiles within Australia’s rapidly diminishing industrial sector.

Macca also had Lyn from Ausbuy on the program—“Are you concerned about the sale of our land to foreign countries and companies …?” She encouraged people to buy products made in Australia and enjoined Claire from Oatlands to join Ausbuy.

I could identify with all these plaints, because I’ve been concerned about Australia going down the toilet for a long time myself.

I’m not just concerned with foreigners buying up Australia, however.  I’m bothered by all of us buying Australia up.

It’s unnecessary.

We should rent it, because we’re paying too dearly for it.  Buying our land instead of renting it means we pay high land prices and high taxation.  This makes us uncompetitive, so our industry, like that of the US, is shipped offshore to where land prices and taxes—and, yes Gina, $2 a day wages—are cheaper.

I don’t think any of the contributors to Macca’s program have cottoned onto the fact that it’s our taxation and landholding regimes that are doing us all in.

Manfully, Ken Henry’s inquiry into Australia’s Future Tax System suggested as much – but nobody listened. It’s too hard to convince people of  the fact that a properly applied land tax is an alternative to high land prices and high taxes.

None of us like paying a land tax because we all like to see our property prices (and debt levels) go up, and don’t connect this with our manufacturing being shifted offshore.

Macca knows this is what’s wrong, because I sent him two copies of Real Estate 4 Ransom.  But it’s difficult to tell people who believe land tax is bad that it’s not, because a rampant real estate industry has done a job on us all.

For example, Enzo Raimondo of the Real Estate Institute of Victoria keeps repeating that a land tax would not make land prices more affordable for future generations.

Yes, Enzo, and black is white.

Although I see you’ve been able to influence the government and CBA-funded Grattan Institute.  It now also wants the Goods and Services Tax to be increased.  [Sigh!]

World Economic Review (Volume 1 Number 1, 2012) the journal of the World Economics Association has a brilliant paper by Michael Hudson and Dirk Bezemer which is a “must read” for those wanting to understand the deep flaw in the distributional system.

The paper Incorporating the Rentier Sector into a Financial Model calls the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate) to account for fattening itself on the teat of society’s surplus whilst labour and capital have been made to starve.

As neo-classical economists wring their hands in complicity and ignorance, Hudson and Bezemer’s account surgically exposes why world economies are plummeting into another economic depression: “finance is not the economy”.