ARE WE BECOMING ANCIENT ROME?

Latifundia perdidere Italiam: Pliny the Elder (AD 24 – 79)

With tax regimes favouring property ‘investment’ and fining real wealth creation, the question must be asked.

The answer really does appear to be ‘yes’ – so we may anticipate some sort of crash. Let’s trust it’s not the collapse of Pax Americana/Pax Sinae?

Self-interested politicians provide a lead: there’s more money to be had in pumping property prices than in working for a living. All but a handful of them are into property spec in a big way, such as they’re unlikely to legislate the necessary taxing of land rent and abolition of taxes that will reduce prices and our enormous levels of private debt.

Seems we must look to younger and increasingly dispossessed swinging voters to call governments and policymakers to account. Only then will the polity change.

There are latent signs that millennials do perceive the issue.