The original US Articles of Confederation looked like this: –

It’s obvious that the Founding Fathers understood socio-economic justice. However, things changed. Alexander Small wrote to his friend Benjamin Franklin to the effect “What the hell has happened, Ben?” To which Franklin replied as follows: –

Franklin seemed to be saying “Politics is the art of the possible, Alexander. You’ll never beat big landowning politicians.”

So has anything changed in this respect? To cite (part of) the song: “It’s still the same old story ….”

Which poses the question: If people from John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Ben Franklin, to Mason Gaffney, Michael Hudson, Fred Harrison and Joseph Stiglitz (among others), can all see that taxes on people, industry and exchange come out of land rent, why do we instead endure the enormous excess burden of the array of punitive taxes that dispossess people and generate poverty?

Is it simply to assuage privileged landowners?

This needs investigation, because the privatisation of land rent also generates repetitive land price bubbles that burst in recession and depression. However, as Ben Franklin said, politicians won’t do anything about it because the majority of them are big landholders. It would seem that the neoclassical economics designed by JB Clark and his followers was set up expressly to hide the sins of real estate speculation.

So, the big guys are once again prepared for us to have the next financial depression, scheduled to begin in 2027. They can’t possibly be oblivious to the current real estate bubble which is about to be pumped by privilege into its final frenzy?