The political left believes we aren’t taxed sufficiently if we wish to solve our societal problems. After all: “We’re not a highly-taxed country!”

Unfortunately, we are. And taxes insert enormous deadweight losses into world economies.

On the other hand, the political right believes that title to land conveys more than exclusive possession of a site: “This is my private property!“

It isn’t, you know. Land is common to humanity, and although you have been granted exclusive possession of your site(s), you have an ongoing liability to pay the rent.

That the stances of left and right are both misguided explains the increasingly parlous state of world economies.

Virtually all social philosophers recognised the need to pay the land rent on the sites we occupy, but we’ve come to defer to those who want to treat land as private property, to speculate in real estate, and who want our incomes and purchases taxed.

There is an alternative.

Neoclassical economists have become accustomed to the currently misbegotten social arrangement, then they wonder why we have troubled economies and inflation. Maybe they need to see that taxes and land prices are the generators of inflation?

Once we understand that all taxes come out of rent (ATCOR) & their excess burden come out of rent (EBCOR), we’ll see the annual rent of our natural resources is some 50% of the economy and that’s plenty to have working for us all, not just for rent-seekers. For a country having its own currency, this may be seen as setting the upper limit for national government spending, as per ‘modern monetary theory’ – simply a lens towards the need to tax land values and deliver a decent universal income to abolish poverty.

So, I wonder whether a little repetition may help our neoclassical economist friends:

“High taxes and land prices will increase inflation. High taxes and land prices will increase inflation. High taxes and land prices will increase inflation. High taxes and land prices will increase inflation. High taxes ….“

Probably not!