The litany of people ringing radio 3AW in Melbourne, and I expect radio stations in other states and overseas, who are complaining about a litany of social issues, exempliflies a wider problem: our extended descent into another major financial collapse. My website has nominated this as ‘the depression we had to have‘.

I’ve been accused of being too negative. I’m a ‘perma bear’. Are the phone callers on 3AW also being called ‘too negative’ by Tom Elliott & Co? Nup, Tom seems to agree with most of them!

“It’s the government’s fault!“, whether Anthony Albanese’s federal government, or Jacinta Allen’s state government. Yes, maybe so, but isn’t there an overarching issue? Are they also responsible for similar conditions in the USA, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, etc?

It’s very easy to brand our politicians as incompetent or corrupt, but it’s happening all around the world. So, they’re all crooks?

Some, but most of them are simply economically illiterate. They’re just blinded by a system of rent seeking which they fail to see has had its day, whether in the capitalist west or the communist east.

Unfortunately, the rent seeking elites, in both capitalist and communist countries, haven’t favoured us with an education of their extractive rent seeking techniques.

Who, for example, understands that in the productive process a surplus is produced, over and above wages and the return to capital? It’s sometimes termed ‘economic rent‘. Isn’t that surplus properly owed equally to every citizen? Yes, but it’s currently taken by rent seekers only. That’s the mechanism by which most of the uber wealthy have made their fortunes in capitalist and communist countries.

But 3AW, and everyone else, ignores the fundamental distributional catastrophe pumping land prices and private debt as we tax our incomes and purchases away, instead of delivering the surplus product as a dividend to everybody.

The US social philosopher, Henry George, explained this necessary simple fiscal adjustment 147 years ago, but elite interests have successfully attended to keeping it buried.

We may all keep complaining about a multiplicity of ills, but their driver, that is, the practice of rent seeking, remains firmy set in economic concrete.