…. why don’t we fix it?

“No, don’t believe this nonsense! It’s outdated rubbish. It would interfere with our property spec and usury!”

As a valuer of real estate, I inspected thousands of properties during my career. There were a number of financial seasons across those forty years.

When it comes to the everyday trials and tribulations of relationships, I’ve concluded that the doors are best left open.

I’ve wondered what proportion of doors were shut by families trying to service for many years impossible land prices and the usury of banks.

…. is a welcome change from what we are taught and see in the media!

Milton Friedman’s statement “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output” typifies the libertarian approach to money.

And, of course, governments spend too much of our money.

They’re incorrect.

‘Libertarians’ have little to say about private banks creating 95% of all money – at impossibly compounding rates of interest. It’s just “governments printing too much money”.

Nor, instead of national governments actually borrowing from private banks via bonds to finanance deficits, do they hold that government should be financing deficit budgets with its own money – our currency – interest-free?

No, they’re terribly fussed about this particular type of ‘debt’.

Libertarians don’t like taxes; but do they see that they are passed on into prices, along with interest and land prices? Nup, there’s the real underlying inflation devaluing our money, boyos!

That real but apparently invisible cost-push inflation is why we are condemned to the repetitive land price cycle whose bubbles burst into recession every 18 years – to resolve themselves in the absence of political action.

But who’s concerned about this aspect of inflation? Very few!

Not ‘libertarians’. Not neoclassical economists (see Ross Gittens in The Age today: “Have a moan about inflation, but just don’t mention profits“).

Nobody – except a few supporters of the ideas of Henry George, a few modern monetary theorists and some universal income people.

John Maynard Keynes has been given bad press on the Bretton Woods agreement which gave the USA the whip hand on international trade, because he stoutly resisted that outcome.

However, you were wrong about the rentier living his last days, Mr Keynes. He still runs the show!

With cancellists viewing things retrogressively get so many things wrong, it shouldn’t surprise that they don’t see what really does need to be cancelled for us to have a prosperous future, namely: –

1. The price of land (to zero); by employing the public collection of land rent. If the rent, the whole rent and nothing but the rent is taken for government purposes, i.e. to withdraw necessary money from the economy to protect the currency from cost-push inflation–about half the cost of our goods and services?–there is nothing left to capitalise into a land price. This means that future generations have only to pay for improvements on a site to gain access to its title.

2. Banks issuing money into the economy at compound interest. Why does this need to be cancelled? Because it creates a merry-go-round of impossible-to-pay private debt. Why should private banks create money instead of the federal government spending its own currency into existence?

OK, so we’ve cancelled those two things: what next? How should money get into the economy instead of banks creating some 95% of it? By the government spending into the private sector, including issuing a universal income. Thereby, the Federal Government issues its own currency – not private banks.

A universal income allows people to exercise their own talents instead of often being little more than wage slaves. A living wage universal income comes immediately and directly out of the unearned economic rent currently expropriated by banks, rent-seeking monopolies, landlords and speculators. It would also effectively abolish poverty and lower wage payments for small businesses, as they’d need only offer a wage on top of the universal income to attract or retain staff.

Those who consider people will become couch potatoes under a universal income system don’t appear to be quite so solicitous about the rent-seeking end of the spectrum currently extracting super-profit rents. These are unearned incomes not being distributed universally. The “It would create loafers!” mindset is therefore very selective, the mentality seemingly challenged by the freedom and prosperity that a universal income would deliver to people and the nation, once combined with the land price and money program.

Isn’t such a program communist? No, Karl Marx and his adherents never attacked the role of banking in generating devastating boom-bust. In fact, when economic rent was the primary source of government ‘revenue’ in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, that period was called ‘The Progressive Era’ as a result of its anti-corruption measures.

It is only by getting our socio-financial house in order that will allow us to deal effectively with the confronting issues of overproduction and carbon pollution. Our political chickens have gone to roost, so who’s going to save us from the land and money foxes that our major political parties are so abjectly serving?

The cost-of-living is emerging as an enormous problem around the world, and only a relatively small part of it is generated by the war in Ukraine.

Economists and the media paint the rising cost-of-living simply as a function of a rise in prices of those goods and services included in the basket chosen to measure consumer price inflation. Interestingly, the contents of this basket differs from country to country, so international CPI comparisons are fraught, to say the least.

Even so, CPI is an incomplete measure anywhere. It ignores those other passed-on costs which go to make up a significant part of the price of our goods and services. These include elements of land prices, taxes and interest that combine to form much cost-push inflation.

Ignoring these passed-on costs is why we’re headed into the inflation-busting depression that will herald the end of this particular 18-year real estate cycle in 2026.

Once our eyes are opened to the sheer extent of this disregarded cost-push inflation, the things that really destroy world economies will become apparent to everybody.

New Zealand’s Addiction to Land Speculation is its Forever Weakness.