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:-
- 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.
- DOXYCYCLINE An approved antibiotic. 100 mg tablet for 10-15 days
- 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.