We’ve improved in many respects over the centuries, but things definitely aren’t working at the moment. Health and education are struggling, housing has become incredibly dear, private debt has achieved near-impossible levels, and poverty and homelessness has increased. Then there’s climate excesses.

Are there reasons for the situation in which we find ourselves?

It’s arguable that we’ve become fascinated by detail and complexity, to such an extent that we overlook fundamentals. By missing or dismissing basic considerations, we generate more and more socio-economic problems. Mainstream media is quite OK with this, though, because “bad news sells“. Whoever wants to hear about fundamental principles that may help us?

It’s boring to learn truths about the natural distribution of wealth: –

that individuals generate their own wages;

that a truly working capital generates its own profit;

that the public, as a whole, generates its own net income: ‘land’ rent.

Ignoring these fundamentals has us constructing misguided tax regimes favoring corporations and individuals that privatise our publicly-generated land and natural resource rents. We’ve degenerated into taxing working people and providers of machinery that make work easier, far more than we do those who speculate in our land and natural resource rents. That’s where things go terribly awry: such that we experience repetitive booms and busts in real estate markets, then blandly dismiss these 18-year cycles as “the natural business cycle“. [By the way, we’re going to require VIMMLBUTT, come the 2027 depression.]

The problem is neither capitalist nor communist systems. It’s an elite in both that is permitted to channel the economy’s publicly-generated net surplus–the economic rent owed to the whole population, equally–unto itself.

Accordingly, we’ve put ourselves into a servitude as real as chattel slavery. We’ve come to work for the economy rather than have it work for us.

Quite incredibly, we had a fairer and more natural distribution of wealth during the fifteenth century than we have today. A humble English labourer with no special skills had more to spend after the provision of food, clothing and shelter than he or she has today!

No, the labourer at that time did not drive a vehicle nor own a television, but nor did the king of England. And, no, the high incomes shown in the chart were not the result of the labour force having been reduced by the ‘Black Death’: that actually shows up the earlier wage bubble preceding the one in the fifteenth century.

Of course, the political excesses of Henry VIII came along to put an end to this ‘Merrie England’. However, despite industrialisation, we’ve acceded to the corrupt privatisation of public land rent. And we understand that all taxes come out of rent–don’t we?–so why not put them there in the first instance, because they can’t be passed off into prices as taxes are?

But our specialists and ‘experts’ continue investigating models and minutiae, and in every other direction, to solve our increasing social problems. We’ve totally lost sight of the natural economic rent forest for its many trees.