I don’t see blogging here about the world’s descent into the 2026 depression for 13 years—i.e. as long as The Keiser Report, but without all its followers 🙂 –to have been a negative thing. Quite the contrary, it’s a matter of describing ‘what is’ — or as my academic brothers and sisters would have it, I’ve employed a positivist approach to describing the depressionary half of the fourth Kondratieff Wave.
It’s quite clear that this method is at odds with neoclassical economics and the mainstream media’s coverage of socio-economic events. Not that I’m an economist. It’s probably that my more practical experience as a valuer of real estate in the Australian Taxation Office, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and founding a private valuation practice held me in great stead to provide more credible insights than most economists and media commenators. (Giving myself a bit of a pat on the back here, if you’ve not noticed. )
On my journey, I’ve been fortunate to make the acquaintance of economists having similar views to my own. They’d probably be described as having a heterodox understanding of economics, including visionaries such as Mason Gaffney, Michael Hudson, Fred Harrison, Fred Foldvary and Steve Keen.
It was Henry George who set me on a course different from the mainstream with his simple but compelling distributional equation
showing that labour and capital will receive their full incomes (W and I ) undimished by arbitrary taxation were we to remove unearned economic rent (R) from GDP (P). By not doing so, taxes and their enormous deadweight losses and land prices will continue generating background inflation, 18-yearly recessions and (eventually) a financial depression.
I find it amazing that we have managed to ignore Henry George and his followers, including my colleagues at Prosper Australia for some 140 years, insofar as this approach would not only have abolished poverty but have been able to provide a universal income such as Guy Standing and others advocate today. George also had a good grip on monetary theory as described by Stephen Zarlenga and more recently by Stephanie Kelton. Not at all bad, Henry George!
It’s a pity that not all UBI-ers and MMT-ers have been able to put the whole VIMMLBUTT together yet; they’re only seeing part of the elephant.
We may only hope that we can all get it together before 2026.