There’s any amount of money to be found for conservative think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Institute of Public Affairs, the Sydney Institute, etc., because these bodies believe things are pretty right as they are. (“Only leftists and socialists want reform.”) This mindset appeals, of course, to the 0.1% who become big donors.

Gina Rinehart and Harry Triguboff would not support a body that supports mining and land taxes. Fair enough. I guess that’s democracy?

Well, only up to a point. Did classical economics need to be redesigned to conflate land with capital in order to suit these people, the 0.1%? Once there was land, labour and capital, but natural resources have somehow transmogrified into capital, simply to appease our rent-seeking overlords. (Mason Gaffney provides chapter and verse here.)

Also, did our tax systems have to be redesigned to relegate land and resource taxation to the bottom of the list of revenue bases, instead of being placed at the top where it once stood in the progressive era?

If you haven’t noticed, the world is currently reaping the whirlwind for appeasing those who rent-seek in land and natural resources but, curiously, no politician has had the gumption to say as much. In fact, in Australia Tony Abbott glories in the fact that he is abolishing the mining tax!  Stupidity rules in Australia!

Although the taxation of land and natural resources remains invisible to economists and politicians, as the limerick suggests, they must eventually wake up to reality:-

An economics professor planned

to live without acknowledging land.

He would have succeeded

but found that he needed

food, clothing and somewhere to stand.