An enlightening video summary of Steve Keen’s “The New Economics”.

HOW DID NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS COME TO BE?

That separate particular story is engagingly told by Professor Mason Gaffney in “Neoclassical Economics as a Strategy Against Henry George“, wherein it is shown the rent-seeking class decided it needed to find economists who would assist to bury the increasingly popular idea of public capture of publicly-generated economic rents, instead of taxing incomes and purchases.

JB Clark and his followers proved to be up to the task, and although it took quite some time to make headway during the post 1893-97 depression Progressive Era, neoclassical economics came to finally achieve its purpose at the 1930s depression. The rent-seeking class had won. It was ‘game over’ for a progressive economics under which everyone might prosper, not just the 0.1%.

By treating homes not as shelter and a place to live, but as a commodity in which to invest, Australia is experiencing worsening social ills: increasing homelessness, bigger and bigger mortgages and higher and higher living costs.  A complicit tax regime has us World Number One at property speculation. Our total land prices represent $364,000 for every man woman and child.

Meanwhile, in the international sphere, we have the Ukrainian war and ongoing wars in the Middle East.

Merry Christmas!

Various religions have their own version of the Mosaic Law “The Land Shall Not Be Sold”. Over the years, many great social philosophers have lent their support to the public capture of land rent if peace, prosperity and security is to prevail.

 Of these, the American, Henry George, did it best by providing the equation P – R = W + I in “Progress and Poverty”; that is, production minus land rent leaves labour and capital untaxed. George demonstrated the privatisation of rent into land prices and the taxing of incomes and purchases had led to recurrent “industrial depression” and the eventual end of civilisations.

Notwithstanding, adherents of most religions have managed to skirt around the social requirement to capture the rent of land publicly instead of taxing production and exchange. This uncaring and greedy approach also accommodates the self-interested thoughts of politicians, economists, and most of those professing no religion at all. It seems that the ‘freedom’ to keep the rent of land to oneself and to generate poverty, dispossession and social unrest at home defeats any opposing philosophy. What are international wars, anyway, if not a less subtle form of land grabbing also?

Private banking interests and super profit-making monopolies are undoubtedly happy with the current state of affairs.

Merry Christmas!

The great cartoonist Michael Leunig has died.

Click on picture.

Michael did the opening sketch for the 1990 video “The Third Way” explaining the ideas of Henry George.

R.I.P. Michael.

RENT SHARING GENERATES ABUNDANCE

VIMMLBUTT

AND HIS NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS HELPED BURY GEORGE’S UNDERSTANDING THAT PRIVATISATION OF LAND RENT EXPLAINS ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Amongst other things, the chart demonstrates clearly that declines in Australia’s land prices foreshadow economic declines.

Maybe that’s why governments consider they need to keep pumping land prices until land price bubbles bursts into the next recession or depression?

The chart is based upon documented total land prices in Australia since 1971, as below.

Bob Menzies acknowledged the problem with our pumping of land prices before the Great Depression.

It appears that governments are not allowed to do so these days.

Instead of taking publicly-generated land and natural resource rents for public finance, we gift it largely to the 0.1%.

Therefore, we have to tax ourselves for working and for businesses earning a profit.

Therefore, the vast majority of us live in debt for most of our working lives so we may service their land prices and our taxation–together with all the deadweight losses in the economy that go with this sorry situation–whilst the 0.1% experience obscene luxury at our expense.

Although it could be fixed by our political representatives making a simple fiscal adjustment on our behalf, we’ve come to think it is the natural order of things; so we do nothing.

Why is this?