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Healthcare is faring badly, with hospitals, doctors, nurses and the ambulance system all under pressure from inadequate funding. The money is there but the neoliberal economic regime into which we have morphed under the label of ‘free enterprise’ denies it.

The public education system is also struggling. For that matter, many parents in the private education system are finding it difficult to meet their children’s school fees. Education, too, could be remedied.

Then there’s climate change. “But how can we manage it, and where’s the money to come from?” Uh, taxing pollution would be a great start.

With the exception of banking and monopoly businesses making super-profits, many businesses are struggling. They see the level of wages to be the issue. They believe they need cheaper labour.

Accepting the fair-seeming business case that wages come at the expense of profits, Australian governments of both persuasions have resorted to excessive migration to solve the “skills shortage” in order to keep wages as low as possible.

But if keeping wages low is a public good, would keeping them at zero also be a public good? The same question might be asked of zero business profits; therefore, how would business fare? Neither lower wages nor profits are proper responses to the situation in which we find ourselves.

We listen to radio shock jocks describe a litany of areas in which Australia is coming up short. It’s all of the above, plus inadequate infrastructure serving our current population and a vast immigration program.

It must be admitted that shock jocks excel at the daily listing of our social problems. However, their questions and solutions are less compelling: “What’s the government doing to fix this issue?” “They need to be sacked!” But if a change of government is seen as a solution, why have they not proven to be solutions? Something’s terribly amiss. Maybe we’re wedded to a misguided distributional system?

Adding fuel to the fire, ‘housing’ has become impossibly expensive. It’s inviting for supply and demand afficionados to blame ‘undersupply’ and a complex immigration program for the increasing financial stress that Australians are feeling. Mortgage stress is not the least of these. It dwarfs the power charges of which we’re often heard to complain.

The Georgist case that privatised land and natural resource rents enforce a regime of low wages and low earned profits doesn’t get coverage in a mainstream media not wishing to offend its advertisers; this includes banking and monopoly super-profit-making business interests. (Remember what happened to the attempt to get a fair return for Australians on our minerals resources via the Resource Super Profits Tax?)

The overarching cause of the litany of problems we face is inadequate capture of our publicly generated resource rents. We seem to prefer to tax ourselves and our purchases – into penury and social collapse.

Were we to ‘tax’ land values instead of wages and purchases, we’d not only have higher wages and higher profits, but lower prices, lower rents and lower monopoly super-profits. We’d also be able to deliver a living wage universal income to abolish poverty.

Many economists quietly concede the point on taxing resource rents (about which Joseph Stiglitz has said we should tax as near to 100% as possible). They accept the solution but argue that it’s far too politically difficult to challenge the fundamental status quo to which we’ve become accustomed. As professionals, their reluctance on this score is more than a pity.

Of course, the solution also has implications for banking, mortgage-holders and investors were land prices to be reduced by an all-in land tax (along the lines as recommended by the Henry Tax Review for a trade-off of abolishing some one hundred other damaging taxes). So, it’s just “too darn hard”.

Government could manage the tax-shift gradually and effectively, but it’s unlikely to be supported by rent-seeking monopolies or those people fearful of substantial change to the existing tax mix.

So, onward we labour, under a terminally-ill social contract; one in which from 2024 to 2026 we’ll likely experience the final three-year land price mania in the current 18-year property cycle before collapsing into a devastating financial depression from 2027. Incredibly, we call this “the natural business cycle”.

Georgists and very few others are able write the economy’s script, but the world has become entangled in the alternative rent-seeking monsters of ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’.

Georgism is the only workable remedy for both.