With cancellists viewing things retrogressively get so many things wrong, it shouldn’t surprise that they don’t see what really does need to be cancelled for us to have a prosperous future, namely: –
- The price of land (to zero); by employing the public collection of land rent. If the rent, the whole rent and nothing but the rent is taken for government purposes, i.e. to withdraw necessary money from the economy to protect the currency from cost-push inflation–about half the cost of our goods and services?–there is nothing left to capitalise into a land price. This means that future generations have only to pay for improvements on a site to gain access to its title.
2. Banks issuing money into the economy at compound interest. Why does this need to be cancelled? Because it creates a merry-go-round of impossible-to-pay private debt. Why should private banks create money instead of the federal government spending its own currency into existence?
OK, so we’ve cancelled those two things: what next? How should money get into the economy instead of banks creating some 95% of it? By the government spending into the private sector, including issuing a universal income. Thereby, the Federal Government issues its own currency – not private banks.
A universal income allows people to exercise their own talents instead of often being little more than wage slaves. A living wage universal income comes immediately and directly out of the unearned economic rent currently expropriated by banks, rent-seeking monopolies, landlords and speculators. It would also effectively abolish poverty and lower wage payments for small businesses, as they’d need only offer a wage on top of the universal income to attract or retain staff.
Those who consider people will become couch potatoes under a universal income system don’t appear to be quite so solicitous about the rent-seeking end of the spectrum currently extracting super-profit rents. These are unearned incomes not being distributed universally. The “It would create loafers!” mindset is therefore very selective, the mentality seemingly challenged by the freedom and prosperity that a universal income would deliver to people and the nation, once combined with the land price and money program.
Isn’t such a program communist? No, Karl Marx and his adherents never attacked the role of banking in generating devastating boom-bust. In fact, when economic rent was the primary source of government ‘revenue’ in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, that period was called ‘The Progressive Era’ as a result of its anti-corruption measures.
It is only by getting our socio-financial house in order that will allow us to deal effectively with the confronting issues of overproduction and carbon pollution. Our political chickens have gone to roost, so who’s going to save us from the land and money foxes that our major political parties are so abjectly serving?
