Karl Marx was correct in arguing that social change needs to be founded on a revolution in economics. Social change that doesn’t act on this truism will fail. Whether or not we perceive it, ‘economics’ simply relates to the way we structure our daily lives. Our financial pages surely demonstrate the egregious mess into which modern neoclassical economics and its adherents have descended by failing to assist the generality of people?

Tax reform is in the air, and we should be coming to the conclusion by now that productivity will fail when property speculation is encouraged by the tax regime at the expense of labour and capital. Workers keep working with both hands tied behind their backs. Yet neoclassical tax reform proponents are still to be found who want to fine those with scant incomes by extending the Goods and Services Tax!

Australia once used to fund our roads, rail, dams, ports and other infrastructure from land rents via municipal rates on land values and state land taxes. We even had a federal land tax for 43 years! Marx got around to this very point in Book III, but he’d already settled for an attack on capitalism itself rather than on its plutocratic rentiers – the self-serving 0.01% – who are still to be found in communist regimes.

So, if we’re looking for a revolution in economics, it should be obvious that we don’t look to this 0.01% for assistance. They control mainstream media and don’t want to change a system that grants them privileges – a free ride on the vast amount of natural resource rents owed equally to every one of us!

Nor need we look to academics. They’ve been insufficiently intellectually rigorous to observe that the privatisation of the public’s rent has proven to be the knot in the distributional system. The right’s apostle of freedom, John Locke, acknowledged the point: “It is in vain in a country whose great fund is land to hope to lay the publik charge on anything else; there at last it will terminate.”

Astoundingly, the latter two categories are the very people who are invited to attend government inquiries into tax reform!

World economies need  grassroots reform. And a patchwork of regulations applied to the status quo won’t do it. There’s a big constituency for fundamental change: There’s a growing new reality. It’s a matter of getting the proper proponents together, to speak with one voice, because disarray is the friend of plutocrats.

But if the movement for socioeconomic reform can’t cotton onto the crux–i.e. that the natural resource rents owed equally to all people are currently stolen by a handful of parasites – then necessary reform won’t happen.