All posts by Bryan Kavanagh

I'm a real estate valuer who worked in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) before co-founding Westlink Consulting, a real estate valuation practice. I discovered, by leaving publicly-generated land rents to be privately capitalised by banks and individuals into escalating land price bubbles, this generates repetitive recessions and financial depressions. We need a tax-switch: from wages, profits and commodities onto economic rents/unearned incomes, if we are to create prosperity and minimise excessive private debt.

CHINA

The British Empire saw the rise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in much the same fashion as we’re now regarding the threat of an emergent China.

WWI was the inevitable outcome of years of the talk of war in which each side demonised the other about its sins.

So far, China’s aggression has related to securing what it sees as “its” borders. It doesn’t have the west’s recent history of expeditionary wars: but who knows? Taiwan?

Wouldn’t it be better on this occasion for the US and China to engage, and remain engaged, in steady diplomatic conversation, instead of each party engaging in trade and/or rhetorical reprisals in order to curry favour at home?

Can’t happen? Won’t happen? Well that’s not good because it’s otherwise obvious the 21st century is likely to outdo the obscenities of WWI (and of WWII for that matter, which was the logical outcome of Germany’s initially impossible WWI reparations, its 1920s property bubble and the ’30s Great Depression).

Chest-beating at the top is whipping up popular foment on both sides. It isn’t looking good.

Just thought I’d brighten your pandemic day, as we also head relentlessly into the financial depression.

Happy days!

“FIX THE MONEY, FIX THE WORLD” …..?

A good episode of the Keiser report with Max interviewing Lawrence Lepard in the second half.

And I like max’s line that considering where we are, and given US foreign policy, “Wouldn’t America bomb itself?”

Oh, and that bit about “Fix the money, fix the world”: close but no cigar, Lawrence. Rather, it should be tax land values, only, to fix money and fix the world.

HOW COME?

How is it that ‘property rights’ have somehow morphed over the years from the right to retain your earnings untrammeled by taxation–and the things you own–to not having to pay our dues on real estate to which we hold title?

That’s some change!

English law rejects absolute ownership of land, and it’s said that the word ‘owner’ derives from the Middle English ‘owerner’: he who owes the rent. Accepting that we are all owerners would reduce land prices enormously and actually address housing unaffordability instead of paying lip service to the principle.

So, how come the labourer is no longer worthy of his hire? It seems private rent-grabbing has well and truly taken hold of western society? We’ll end up paying dearly for tax regimes that favour real estate spec over real wealth generation.

Did this transformation begin with the sleight of hand ‘temporary’ measure of income tax, dished out to us by neoclassical economists at the onset of the Great Depression?