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.

PEPE ESCOBAR INTERVIEWS MICHAEL HUDSON

If we can see past their leaders, both the USA and China have extremely threatening economic issues to be solved.

Since ‘post-industrialisation’, financialisation of the economy in the USA has amounted to the inflation and the grabbing of asset values. Industrial capitalism has been thoroughly replaced by rentier capitalism.

The USA could be characterised as ‘Wall Street Rent-Seeking versus The People’.

Industry is thriving in China, of course, but localities are doing very poorly, having sold out their future rents to the cities. So, it’s a matter of ‘The Cities v. The Localities’.

Who’s better-placed to solve their respective issues?

This is a wide-ranging economic discussion between Pepe Escobar and Michael Hudson for those people able to see beyond the words ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’ if we are to understand the failure of both the West and East to publicly capture their ground rents.

h/t Alanna Hartog and the Henry George School

GOVT, RBA: “BANKS CANNOT GO BROKE”

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It seems Australian governments and the Reserve Bank of Australia have taken the game “Monopoly” to heart, instead of the more-considered “The Landlord’s Game” from which the concept of the game had been purloined.

Whereas “The Landlord’s Game” had provided salutary warnings of the ills that landlordism would visit upon societies—instead of seeing land as the common inheritance of humanity for which the rent must be paid—the aim of “Monopoly” is for one person to win out by sending all others in the game broke – with the assistance of the bank.

The game “Monopoly” is fun, of course, but when taken seriously by governments and central bankers, the consequences for their societies are dire.

In “Neoclassical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George“, the late great Mason Gaffney provided chapter and verse concerning how the study of economics was corrupted in order to kill off the concept that land rent, being publicly-created, had also to be collected publicly – instead of being privatised and taxing productive work. That the principle carries a significant pedigree has been borne out by many philosophers since the biblical injunction “The land shall not be sold.”

Governments and central banks have taken up playing “Monopoly” with us with gusto, and the game can’t possibly end well. ‘The Bank cannot lose!’

KILLING OFF HENRY GEORGE

“To most modern readers, probably George seems too minor a figure to have warranted such an extreme reaction. This impression is a measure of the neo-classicals’ success: it is what they sought to make of him. It took a generation, but by 1930 they had succeeded in reducing him in the public mind. In the process of succeeding, however, they emasculated the discipline, impoverished economic thought, muddled the minds of countless students, rationalized free-riding by landowners, took dignity from labor, rationalized chronic unemployment, hobbled us with today’s counter-productive tax tangle, marginalized the obvious alternative system of public finance, shattered our sense of community, subverted a rising economic democracy for the benefit of rent-takers, and led us into becoming an increasingly nasty and dangerously divided plutocracy.”

Mason Gaffney, Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem against Henry George