We all have a right to private property.

Yes! However, land rent is not the private property of a group of individuals nor of any segment of society, as are wages and earned profits.

Land rent is owed equally to everybody because it is created by society as a whole, not by any individuals. Permanently remove people from a city and it will become worthless.

Those who equate exclusive possession of real estate title with the right to its rent as private property are sorely mistaken. When this belief becomes ensconsed in a nation, equality of opportunity is denied to people and their economy. This generates poverty.

The character of a nation is measured by the quantum of rent it captures for its people .

There are no nations stepping up to the human right criterion of equality of opportunity by collecting the land rent for its people. Permitting economic rent to be privatised explains the continuing existence of poverty within otherwise wealthy countries.

There is much needs doing in this connection.

~

An equation helping to explains this further is to be found at the heart of Henry George’s great “Progress and Poverty“.

~

It’s fake, and it has proven itself to be fake.

.

It’s the smooth-talking neoliberal economics of ‘Libertarians”, Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and, yes, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Howard and their successors.

Most adherents of neoclassical and neoliberal economics deflect any criticism as evidence that we’ve been infiltrated by ‘the creeping socialism affecting us all’: “Just look at all the welfare spending!” (So, instead of be able to ‘afford’ pensions or a universal income, we needed compulsory superannuation, Paul Keating? OK, so Treasury was also indoctrinated?)

We’ve been experiencing austerity for the poor, largesse for the 0.1% and a great deal of cynical carrot-offering to others to the effect that “You, too, can be super-wealthy like us!”

Hey, chaps, if it wasn’t for ‘all that welfare’ that has emerged under greed-is-good economics, people would be out after you in the streets with pitchforks! The socio-economic morass into which we’ve been descending is actually the result of your ‘can-do-capitalism’, Mr Morrison. In reality, it is about as ‘capitalist’ as happy clappers are genuine Christians.

How about a little nuance to our current situation, away from the rentier-serving nonsensical capitalist-communist bifurcation?

Since the outset of the 1970s we’ve been experiencing speculative rent-seeking, pure and simple. It’s neither capitalist nor communist, in fact, Evergrande and its likes confirms that China has also been infected by wealth-extracting rentierism: a system in which the wealth generated by workers is waylayed by the 0.1% and a pittance is redirected back to workers and the unemployed as a sop to their servility.

I admit, this is far from a popular analysis, but if we look at at wealth creation and extraction and the Trickle-Up Economics of rentierism, the data bears it out.

Why is Prosper Australia the only body in the world making this distinction? We won’t solve the worldwide political impasse without seeing this speculative rentierism as being parasitical and in favour of only the 0.1%. It’s neither capitalist nor socialist but banking and monopolies love it – and it’s they who are calling the shots!

~~~

Unlikely to resonate, however, until the financial meltown brings us all to our senses.

Once a person is hospitalised in Australia with COVID-19 are they being given the ivermectin, zinc and doxycycline triple therapy?

If not, what a shocking scandal!

Nobody should be dying from COVID-19!

…. but haven’t we long been in the final rentier phase of capitalism. Richard?

Maybe it’s time to shift the tax regime to land and natural resources to euthanize the rentier, Richard?

This is a very good rundown, except that people who see the fundamental causes of inflation–namely, land prices themselves plus the taxes on labour and capital which are passed on in prices–know that the taxing of land values instead, combined with a universal income, are more liberating options than a repressive ‘job guarantee’.

MMT without this particular hiccup otherwise offers a quite reformative understanding of money.

The many who claim that MMT is about printing money are misguided.

I also recommend reading Stephanie Kelton’s excellent “The Deficit Myth” for further MMT details.

If you’ve not noticed, I’m a Georgist.

Getting into conversation with others on social, financial or economic matters, I try to stick to the matter under discussion.

The conversation occasionally ends with me accused of being a communist.

It’s becoming quite a binary-divided world: If you’re happy with things the way they are, it seems you’re OK; if you have more progressive ideas and want to see significant changes made, then you’re a communist.

McCarthyism didn’t die out with the death of Joe McCarthy: McCarthyism most certainly lives!

There’s little doubt the world was a little more progressively Georgist during what many say was capitalism’s most productive, least corrupt period the “Progressive Era” circa 1900-1925. Most taxes came from real estate values. Today they’re only 10%

The Progressive Era was communist?

I’ve noticed the epithet usually comes from Libertarians clinging to the neoclassical model. It seems we have all the liberty, the freedom, we need.