Very few people have asked how Donald Trump, a man of 74, gets the coronavirus and exits hospital within a couple of days.

I reckon if I contracted the virus, I’d be off to my GP seeking Australian gastroenterologist Professor Thomas Borody’s “triple therapy”. It’s said to consist of:-

1. A dose of IVERMECTIN i.e. 3 mg tablets approved for the treatment of worms and lice; based on 0.2 mg for each kilogram of your body weight.
2. DOXYCYCLINE An approved antibiotic. 100 mg tablet for 10-15 days
3. ZINC tablets 25 mg twice daily.

Prof Borody says if the doctor isn’t initiated in the therapy–there are plenty who are–people should get him or her to email gp@cdd.com.au.

In contrast to “Occam’s Razor”, however, we’re very sceptical of simple solutions these days. That’s a good starting point in examining any question, but maybe we go a bit too far in believing “there are no simple solutions”?

In fact, self-interest always seem to find a way to deny there is such a thing as a remedy when it affects the self-interested. Maybe that explains why we’re currently confronted with a mounting number of existential crises? We seem to major on trying to deal with all these adverse outcomes, rather than applying a remedy to underlying causes. And it seems we’re just as sceptical of causes as we are of cures.

One hundred and forty-one year ago, the American economist-social philosopher Henry George showed that the returns to labour and capital are what’s left after the rent of land, a surplus, is taken from production. It’s a very simple proposition. George said if we’re to have an economy of abundance, and labour and capital are to receive their rightful reward, we need to capture the publicly-generated rent of land. Failing to do this, land rent will be privately capitalised into land prices which reduce the returns to labour and capital, even before we tax them. George’s remedy became known as “the single tax”, and these days we scoff at it without examination.

Henry George’s name was on everybody’s lips, having forecast the 1893 depression and having died as it ended in 1897. His progressive and conservative supporters came to be elected to public office across the English-speaking world during the Progressive Era to 1920, with the aim of putting an end to the graft, corruption and speculative real estate excesses that had characterised the 1880s. They became a political force to be reckoned with in capitalism’s most successful period.

Although their efforts fell well short of full adoption of the Georgist program, it went a long way. During the period, Georgist Keir Hardie founded the UK Labour Party, serving as its first parliamentary leader from 1906 to 1908; the British Liberal Party brought down the People’s Budget of 1909 which featured a land tax; an Australian federal land tax was introduced by Henry Georgist Labor Party Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher in 1910: and, in 1913 Australia’s capital city, in the Australian Capital Territory founded on a land rent system, was formally named ‘Canberra’.

But economies started going back to their rent-seeking ways in the 1920s once John Bates Clark’s neoclassical economics, fudging the incomes to land and capital together, had established firm roots in academia. Mason Gaffney’s Neoclassical Economics as a Stratagem against Henry George makes the point that “JB Clark’s bibliography includes at least 24 works directed against George, over a span of 28 years.” Neoclassical economics and its sub-set, neoliberal economics, have done their jobs well in killing off the name of Henry George and his remedy. Karl Marx’s name resonates more today.

Thus, dear reader, do we continue to this day to have the rentier virus which continues to infect capitalism.

I’m sure the federal government will fix all your deferred mortgages, folks, because it has been entrapping you into impossible mortgages for some time now and keeping the bubble in land prices inflated. Mind you, the RBA, which is meant to look after the interests of all Australians–not just the banks–is doing a good job of it too!

This is arguably the essence, the heart and soul, of Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty”.

The 20th century and the first part of the 21st has been unable to get to grips with the importance of this simple formula, and although much poverty has been ameliorated over the period, the outset of the 21st century in the developed western world has been marked by increasing private debt and poverty. The increased privatisation of land rent explains escalating land prices and taxes, accompanied by declining earned wages and earned profits as rent-seeking banks and monopolies have done obscenely well.

I was so struck by a wayward interpretation of Henry George’s distributional formula in an addendum to the launch of Australia’s Future Tax System, that I was inspired to make the first of my two (or was it three?) submissions to the inquiry:-

The popular reception of Progress and Poverty–arguing that not to publicly capture rent was theft and the cause of poverty–was such that the powerful rent-seeking class was forced to re-cast the study of economics into ‘neoclassical economics’. It still rather pointedly declares that there is no moral difference between man-made capital and ‘land’, viz nature in general.

Economists might do well to take a peep at John Wilson Bengough’s political economy primer – in words of one syllable.

Congrats, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson!

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2020/press-release/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/business/nobel-economics-paul-milgrom-robert-wilson.html

Thanks to the work of EL Keirnan, the state of Victoria passed a Bill in 1920 allowing municipalities to switch their rating base from net annual value to unimproved capital value rating (now known as site value rating).

At the outset of the 1990s, more than half of Victoria’s population lived in municipalities which had chosen to use EL Keirnan’s legislation to rate on land values only. This change thereby acted to penalise the holding of lots out of use and vacant for speculative purposes, and not to penalise those who built homes, factories, offices, shops, &c.

In the 1990s, the Kennett Victorian Government offered municipalities what amounted to bribes were they to switch away from site value rating or net annual value rating to capital value rating. All but two councils have since made this unfortunate shift, and no Victorian municipality now uses site value as its rating base.

The states of New South Wales and Queensland continue exclusively to employ site value rating for municipal rating purposes.

OK, so we know there’s sufficient rent to run government, to support a living wage basic income, and to keep the currency stable? (ATCOR & EBCOR, John Locke, Mason Gaffney, Joseph Stiglitz, &c.)

And that we’d eliminate rent-seeking, and all the deadweight losses created by taxes on productivity. However, after this Twitter exchange with Lindsay David suggesting it would also solve our industrial relations problems, I got to thinking about who might possibly oppose a universal living wage basic income.

________________
Lindsay David@linzcom·44m

After a week up the coast it’s pretty clear Sydney will eventually lose more locals to regional NSW and elsewhere. And big business could save a fortune shifting administrative roles et al out of the CBD and Metro area320

Bryan Kavanagh@bryankav123

Replying to @linzcom It’s looking that way. I’m expecting businesses’ 3rd iteration: when an Australian living wage basic income is introduced, they’ll only have to pay some amount additional to the UBI to attract employees. IR solved! 2:40 PM · Oct 10, 2020·Twitter Web App

_____________

So, I began to ask myself who might be against a decent socio-political arrangement that could introduce an economy of abundance. I discovered five potential answers:-

1. Although small businesses would be in favour of a UBI, banking and the big monopolies, who currently make super-profits from extracting rent from the economy, would be against the idea because it clearly acts to reduce their super-profits/unearned incomes.

2. Then, if it solves industrial relations problems, what’s the role of the union movement? Wouldn’t it only have a ‘keep watch’ involvement then? And wouldn’t the system act to reduce super-profits of industry superannuation funds, as also with the the commercial funds (and other monopolies)? So, they might be against a UBI, too! (But a UBI would surely help workers!)

3. I also realised that those modern monetary theorists who are wedded to the idea of a ‘job guarantee’ would probably resist a living wage UBI, not because it wouldn’t work for people, but because it shows up the silliness of what amounts to gig jobs (i.e. enforced work for the minimum wage).

4. Then there’s The Church. They’re into rent-seeking, too. In the days of the land rent, they would have supported the idea of a universal living wage basic income, because it wasn’t at all necessary! But in these days, where “The land shall not be sold” and usury have been relegated from any public consideration, isn’t it everyone’s ‘moral duty’ to work? So maybe the churches will resist a UBI, too?

5. Then there’s a media beholden to all of the above, in favour of a ‘rightful and proper status quo‘, even in view of the widening income gap and collapsing economies!

So, it’s not just land tax reform that’s ‘up against it’. There are interests that would possibly also oppose a living wage universal basic income, which otherwise seems to be an eminently fair proposition for both sides of politics?