We’ve been told to think about “housing affordability” but it’s really about the affordability of land.

Except for Henry VIII’s extravagance, land prices wouldn’t have existed!

Economists keep telling us that land prices are high because of “excessive demand” but this shows that supply and demand affects land rent, not land price: –

Just look at Australia’s land price increases since 1984! That’s why women must go out to work too early after the birth of their children.

After 30 years of “Life Matters”, Geraldine Doogue was getting pretty close to the truth of the matter this morning!

Anyway, forget about taxing land values instead of incomes: you women had better just get out there to work! No UBI for you!

“But it wouldn’t be capitalism if we collected land rent instead of income taxes!” Yes it would. We made a pretty good effort during the Progressive Era when most taxes were levied on land values – until Neoclassical Economists lied to us that there was “No longer enough rent“.

That’s BS of course, because all taxes and their excess burden come out of rent anyway (ATCOR and EBCOR), so there’s always enough rent to be taxed away to rid us of inflation!