When I click on the YouTube video, I see FOX have now blocked it on copyright grounds.  Why wouldn’t they?

If you want to know what this scene from the Simpsons was about, it consisted of Montgomery Burns pointing to a generally upward-trending graph with a catastrophic decline at its rightmost extremity.

“If you don’t continue giving all your money to rich people like me”, Mr Burns says pointing to the earlier part of the chart, “we’ll all go over the fiscal cliff like this!” [Pointing to the perpendicular decline at the end of the chart.]

Marx (Karl, not Groucho) was correct in arguing that social change must be founded on a revolution in economics. Any revolution that doesn’t act on this truism must fail, a la Libya, a la Egypt.

Whether or not we perceive it, ‘economics’ simply relates to the way we structure our daily lives and, surely, our financial pages have once again highlighted the egregious mess into which our modern neo-classical economics has been allowed to descend?

By now we should be coming to the realisation that the taxation of labour and capital has us trying to work with both hands tied behind our backs.

Although he may have been well-intentioned in other respects, it was Marx’s economics proved him to be “the prince of muddleheads”.

Meanwhile, largely under the influence of the US-British alliance, the financial system has been permitted to transmogrify from one based upon free enterprise into a plutocracy where privatisation and corporatisation of rents generated from the public’s natural resources has grown apace. (We once used to fund our roads, rail, dams, ports and other infrastructure from these land rents. Remember?)

Marx was getting around to this very point in Book III, but he’d already settled for an attack on capitalism itself instead of on its plutocratic rentiers – the self-serving 0.01%.

The “Occupy” movement is yet to discern this distinctive point, because the minions of the 0.01% have so far been able to downplay the quantum of the economy’s natural resource rent within the economy. Occupy needs to get with the program to capture back our natural resource rents, as argued by Brian Czech. (Czech-Production-Function-and-Henry-George)

So, if we’re looking for a revolution in economics, it’s obvious we don’t look to the 0.01% for assistance. They don’t want to change a system that grants them a free ride on the vast amount of natural resource rents owed to the 99.99%.

Nor do you look to academics. They’ve been insufficiently intellectually rigorous to discern privatisation of the public’s rent has proven to be the knot in the distributional system.

You don’t look to lawyers. They’re occupied dealing with both sides of the question as the system now stands.

Unfortunately, nor can you look to most men. Many of them are concentrating on how they, too, may scramble atop the FIRE sector’s ladder. (FIRE being an acronym for Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.) As we know, FIRE is a good servant but a bad master.

No, those who want a revolution in economics must get on board with those who are the most downtrodden by the current economics, namely, indigenous peoples and women.

Indigenes have always known that the fruits of the land are the basis of any economy and, for this reason, land must never be found in any list of commodities. Land is different and, whilst it may be exclusively occupied, the original inhabitants know it may never really become ‘private property’.

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.”

Whilst a few women have successfully elbowed men aside in ascending the ladder of business, most haven’t, either because they didn’t want to join the rat race, because they believe a more cooperative system is possible, or they were defeated by its excesses. Although it may differ in degree, they understand only too well that you don’t have to point overseas to parts of the Muslim world to see how the economic system fails women.

World economies need a grassroots reform. A patchwork of regulation applied to the status quo won’t do it.

There’s a pretty big constituency out there for change. There’s a growing new reality. It’s a matter of getting the proponents together to speak with one voice, because disarray is the friend of the plutocrat.

Women and indigenous people must be at the forefront of the movement, and they should be supported by men of goodwill who realise thoroughgoing economic reform is essential. (In this context, resurrection of the Henry Tax Review becomes a priority.)

But if the movement for economic reform doesn’t cotton onto the crux–that the natural resource rents owed equally to all the people are currently stolen by a handful of parasites (hello, mining interests!)–the necessary revolution is bound not to happen.

I enjoy The Daily Reckoning, insofar as it provides an alternative viewpoint to mainstream analysis.

But its extreme right-wing opinion that there’s no role for government when it comes to business is so Ayn-Randian Right it offers no genuine response to wild-eyed lefties nor to the mainstream. It’s just plain wrong.

The boys at The Daily Reckoning might even have written the screenplay for Atlas Shrugged.  It makes me shudder that these guys could actually be sitting in a theatre nodding their approval at the claptrap that spilled from what must be the worst movie of 2012.

Has it been released here yet? I saw Atlas Shrugged in New York in October and envied my wife for nodding off throughout much of it. How I would have loved to have slept through all that excruciatingly arrant nonsense!

It’s like this guys. Free enterprise is a great thing.  The corporatisation of natural monopolies aint. The ONE thing a government MUST do is to capture the rent of our natural resources instead of taxes, because they are OUR rents – any surplus after necessary government revenue to be distributed to citizens as a dividend.

Leave the operators their profits, but NOT the super-profits which are our natural resource rents.

Otherwise you’ll have the 0.01% continuing to become obscenely rich at the expense of we 99.99%; the 99.99% losing their purchasing power, getting into too much debt, and economies grinding to a halt – like now.

It’s easily fixed, of course. Let’s have true FREE enterprise, sans the plutocrats stealing our natural resource rents, and without self-defeating taxes on labour and capital.

It works.

But I’ll bet the blokes at The Daily Reckoning haven’t caught up with the case for Georgism, or how our economies have long been run by the rent-seeking plutocrats, like banks.

Guys, do yourselves a favour and read this new insightful account by Brian Czech on how we’ve been dudded. It will expand your mind on how our natural monopolies must be treated – if you’re up for it, that is.

The idiom that fire is a good servant but bad master is well understood in Australia where bushfires in dry summers regularly ravage the countryside, often resulting in the loss of life.

The one hundred and seventy-three people who died in the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria on 7 February 2009 tragically reinforce the point that an out-of-control fire can indeed be a devastating master.

It is not to trivialize this loss of life to compare it to the out-of-control financial sector currently ravaging world economies.

In the world of finance, nobody has popularized the acronym “FIRE”–for finance, insurance and real estate–more than Michael Hudson.

The fire idiom holds true for the economy’s FIRE sector. Instead of retaining it as the service sector, it has been put on a pedestal and promoted to the position of our master, so much so that it, too, has brought about devastating results.

This is no small claim.

We are lied to that banks must be bailed out because they are too big to fail. Some are apparently even too big to prosecute for criminality. [!] Their CEOs must be paid obscene amounts for their obscene actions – n’est-ce pas Lloyd Blankfein?

Clearly the greatest financial obscenity is the lending and creation of money against the ‘security’ of land prices.

Whilst this may seem an obscure reference at first, once we are able to see land prices simply as reflecting the private capitalisation of publicly-generated land rent owed equally to ALL people in the community–not just to banks–we may come to understand how lending against land price is a fraudulent and extremely volatile practice.

To understand the point is to understanding the manner in which the FIRE sector has failed us, and failed its own risk management.

Michael Hudson deftly exposes this failure in the release yesterday of his paper America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff .

2013 promises to be a critical year.  Hopefully, a far greater number of people will come to see the FIRE sector’s rent-seeking as the catalyst that turned our former servant into a voracious and devastating master.

Section 82 of the Australian Constitution says in part:

82. The costs, charges, and expenses incident to the collection, management, and receipt of the Consolidated Revenue Fund shall form the first charge thereon…

If the words mean what they say, they make it unconstitutional to require employers, at their own expense, to collect personal income tax payable by employees, or to require vendors, at their own expense, to collect GST payable by customers…

More here ….

Once upon a time there was a man who thought work was a fool’s game. He had a plan. He would make people his slaves. Not slaves who get food, clothing and shelter from their master. No, worse: they would have to pay for their own upkeep.

His plan was this. Land was very cheap and the townspeople prosperous–himself included–so he proceeded to buy up all the land he could.

After a while, he owned much of the land in town and virtually all of the land on its outskirts. People at first paid him modest rents, or else fairly low prices to buy a block of land.

But as the man’s rents grew and land prices increased, the townsfolk coincidentally seemed to grow much poorer. Some became unemployed and many couldn’t afford to pay for the land that had once cost them very little. Whereas there had been no unemployment at all, they had now come to regard an unemployment rate of 5% as pretty darn good: if only it could be got back down to that level!

The man called a town meeting. “We’ve got to do something for our poor”, he challenged them. “If we all chip in part of our wages and salaries, we can create a safety net for the unemployed and dispossessed and give them a little human dignity. I’m better off financially than most of you, so I don’t mind if I contribute the most. I’m also going to set up a number of charities.”

The townspeople thought these were great ideas. They voted to put them into effect, and wholeheartedly proceeded to elect this honorable man the mayor of the town.

Unaccountably, the mayor’s rents and land prices seemed to escalate, and those townspeople who still had jobs had to work for less. Some even went to work for the mayor. He had created employment for them, so he became more highly-regarded. The reverend thought him to be a true saint and promoted the mayor’s charities from the pulpit.

Some of the town’s unemployed turned to crime, so the number of town policemen grew. “This is a product of the times, a truly bad part of the business cycle”, the mayor declared …. “although [sotto voce] some people just can’t be helped, can they?”

He set up a committee to inquire into why the town’s productivity continued to decline and social cohesion had broken down.

The productivity committee reported that the town would have to be more innovative in its approach to work and business. Also, people would have to work a lot harder and their wages and salaries would have to be drastically cut, because they were clearly  too high.  A minority opinion suggested matters of credit and the town’s money supply needed to be studied in depth, because there was too much debt in the town and housing had become completely unaffordable.

The mayor agreed on all counts.
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…. AND THEY’RE INTERRELATED, OF COURSE!

AND, TOGETHER, THEY’VE GOT YOU HERE AGAIN.  WE DON’T REALLY LEARN, DO WE?

NO SURPLUS?  WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD, WAYNE!

Although to be fair, you did tell the states to use their land-taxing powers, like the ACT government has, to make up their revenue shortfall.

And [hint] when you next speak to RBA governor, Glenn Stevens, could you please remind him the interests of Australia’s banks are NOT necessarily the same as those of the Australian people – and ask him whose side he’s really on?