SURRENDERING AT THE OUTSET?

“Recurring financial crises are part of the cyclical nature of a free market economy.”

[Sigh!]  With an opening sentence like that one, how likely is it that the Faculty of Law’s symposium ‘Global Financial Crisis: The Way Forward’ at Bond University on 9 April is going to be anything but complete farce?

So, an equivalent of the GFC, at regular intervals, is all that the “free market” has to offer us? Wait!  Don’t tell me: all we need then is a little more ‘regulation’?  Yes?  OMG!

Will any of the listed speakers have the intestinal fortitude to challenge the symposium’s hapless starting premiss?  Surely, there’s got to be a serious amount of grey matter among that lot, or, are they all fresh out of intellectual rigour?

Why should not the starting point for the Bond symposium be that these mindless 18-year cycles are most unnatural, and can be remediated by abolishing taxes and applying a land and resource rent system? Many people have written to this effect, even forecasting the GFC, but they are shunned because they are outsiders, beyond the pale:-

“Don’t you realise that although a land rent as an alternative to taxes may seem to be a simple fiscal adjustment, it actually amounts to a revolution?”

“Yes – a revolution which removes these repetitive 18 year cycles of boom and busts forever and creates a sustainable and genuinely free market.”

It has all happened before, of course.  The French Physiocrats tried to warn Louis XVI to apply l’impot unique, the single tax on land, but he gallantly chose to foster the French Revolution and lose his head rather than offend his brothers in land.

Seems retaining land monopoly and speculation is a principle worth dying for, even if it does create regular GFCs?