Necessary revolutions sweeping the world at the moment, whether in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, or the Occupy movement in the USA, Britain, or elsewhere, will ultimately fail – unless they are underpinned by an economics capable of reconciling people and the planet.

Economic justice and prosperity can only be founded in these terms.  Bills of Rights are a mockery and don’t cut it at all.

There’s only one such economics; some call it Georgism.

Anything else is a wannabe.

As no government nor revolution has the abolition of taxes in its program, there will be no win in this regard in 2012, hopelessly inadequate fumbling with property and land ‘taxes’ in Greece and Ireland notwithstanding.

Such is the power of the 1%.

Nevertheless, folks:  All the best for 2012!

I see the mayor of Richmond, Queensland, John Wharton  has called in local support, including that of his federal member Bob Katter in opposing Bankwest selling up Runnymede Station which has been in Wharton’s family for 96 years.

The mayor claims Bankwest has indulged in corrupt practices.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the unfortunate case, it seems the property was leveraged with the bank for one reason or another, and risk is always attendant upon mortgages.

The station’s name, “Runnymede”, conjures up memories of Magna Carta and freedom of the individual against (Bankwest’s?) arbitrary authority, but those who’ve ferreted a little deeper see Magna Carta as the Barons’ subterfuge for throwing off responsibilities relating to their lands, setting the British landholding system on course for repetitive boom and bust.

Amongst other things, charts here and here suggest Magna Carta may have proved to be less of a success than the lords of the land were in gradually throwing off their land rents since 1215 (and putting taxes on us).

I’m very pleased that the federal member for Kennedy saw fit to support his friend, John Wharton at Runnymede Station.

I’d also be pleased if Bob Katter could hold fire on his down home chuckle and chatter and explain to people exactly where he stands on Australians capturing their mineral rents to the public purse, and whether he is behind the principle of property rates and land taxes.  Seems he’s opposed to both.

Yet, there it is, standing proud in the policy platform of his new party, Katter’s Australian Party – “Stop selling off State Assets”! Oh, I’m taking that the wrong way, Bob? We have no right to the annual rent of our most precious asset, the land – to the ‘super profits’ of our natural resources?  Why not, pray tell?

And I trust you’re going to support ALL Queenslanders who lose their home to the banks, Bob?

There are lessons to be learnt here.

Banks should NOT lend against bubble-inflated asset prices—for the sake of ALL Australians, including John Wharton—and capturing annual land and natural resource rents instead of taxes will not only stop bubbles from forming in the first place, but would see productivity replace property speculation as Australia’s national pastime.

C’mon Bob, tell us who you’re really with: the people – or the 1%?

A GOOD ACCOUNT

I’m no accountant nor bookkeeper.  Apart from having a brother-in-law who is an accountant, the nearest I’ve got to them is having mine produce our annual financials and tax return, and to address a group of chartered accountants at their dinner at the RACV Building in Melbourne about five years ago on the subject of the coming financial collapse.

Since Boxing Day, however, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Jane Gleeson-White’s “DOUBLE ENTRY:  How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world—and how their invention could make or break the planet”.

Gleeson-White’s research into the founder of double entry bookkeeping, Luca Pacioli, is as admirable as the genuine homage she pays to the fifteenth century Franciscan friar for his clever and dogged approach to improving the system of recording financial dealings.  Pacioli broke with tradition to write in the vernacular to capitalise, in every sense of the word, on the invention of the printing press to get his message out.

But it was to where Jane Gleeson-White then takes the book that grabbed me most.

Yes, Pacioli’s system of double entry has served the world well, she notes, but practitioners have not been beyond abusing it, as did the recently departed Arthur Anderson company in Enron’s grand fraud.  (I’ll long have the memory of the bastard at his monitor, crying “Burn, Baby, burn!”)

It’s still a matter of garbage in, garbage out, or maybe hiding the nasties by cleverly taking them off balance sheet. (Why am I reminded that Paul Keating’s 9% superannuation guarantee levy couldn’t possibly be a payroll tax by stealth because it is compulsorily directed into non-government funds?)

Gleeson-White notes that we’ve improved the national accounts since Keynes’ first applied Luca Pacioli’s principles to them, but says the state of the planet and of economies attests to the fact we’ve still got a long way to go.

The author comes tantalizingly close to seeing economic rent’s relationship to people and the planet! (I like to think of natural resource rent as the glue that holds society together.)

Maybe the problem is not the limitations of GDP as a measuring stick—i.e. that it underestimates the true costs involved in the making of a Big Mac, or the real value of trees—but by so obviously failing to break incomes down into earned incomes and (unearned) natural resource rents, we don’t expose those shysters who continue their destruction of the planet?

And as it’s little known that ‘super profits’ (especially land and natural resource rents) make up close to 50% of GDP—and are mainly captured by the 1%—what a great follow-up that might make, Jane?

“Opening the tax act is like entering the door to a parallel universe.”

– Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia, Patrick Keane, January 2011.

Stephanie Gardiner has done Australia a great service in exposing these parasites – because there are many others like the Wakils.

The tax system – the lack of any significant annual charge on the holding of land values – makes them do it.

That’s just another reason  Australia needs to heed Ken Henry’s call for reform of its aberrant taxation system …. quickly.  Like many other nations, taxation’s deadweight is rapidly bringing the country to its knees.

…. we’ve got a dud in Melbourne who believes Melburnians should partake in the extraordinary game of bidding taxi license prices up into a massive Golden Egg that doesn’t deliver an efficient service.

Seems land and natural resources aint the only government-granted privileges capitalised into bubbles?

And, for goodness sake Professor Fels, don’t be stood over by M’lud Robert Doyle. I reckon he’d want all those whose property prices are going to crash over the next few years to be compensated, too.  After all, they purchased their properties in good faith?

THE TELEGRAPH

Monday 19 December 2011

EU crisis: The Frogs do love us – they’re just hopping mad with Germany

Our entente with the French is still cordiale, but they badly need someone to shout at, writes Boris Johnson.

By Boris Johnson

There is a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail that captures the current dialogue between Paris and London. One evening King Arthur arrives with his knights at a darkened castle. He tells the figure on the battlements that he has come to recruit noble knights in his quest for the grail. For some reason the guard turns out to have a heavy French accent.

In fact, the whole castle is occupied by French knights, and they treat the English king with disgraceful rudeness.

First, the guard tells Arthur that he has no interest in obtaining a Holy Grail, since they already have one in the castle. When Arthur says he would like to have a look at this marvel, the French knight refuses, and concludes: “I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty‐headed animal food trough whopper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.” The French then cry “fetchez la vache”, and use a trebuchet to bombard the Knights of the Round Table with a dead cow.

If you cut out some of the raspberry blowing and bottom‐flashing, that is just about the level of the current diplomatic broadsides from Paris. David Cameron goes to the dark castle in Brussels in his quest for common sense, and ever since they have been peppering us with dead cows. Various French ministers have queued up to say rude things about Britain and the British economy. In an amazing breach of diplomatic convention, the French prime minister has called for Britain’s credit rating to be downgraded and announced that he would much rather be French than these so silly British.

In a bid to calm things down, Nick Clegg has been forced to ring the French up and ask them to stop being so jolly insulting.

“This is quite unacceptable,” the Liberal Democrat leader is supposed to have fumed at the French government.

I don’t know if the French have been chastened by this rebuke, but I think we should urge Nick to relax. Look at the polls. Anyone would think that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron began that summit with a secret meeting, at which they agreed to help boost the other’s domestic ratings. “I’ll bash you if you’ll bash me,” they said. “Our voters will love it!” And hey presto. The Prime Minister takes a principled opposition to plans for a Fiscal Union (FU), and shoots ahead of poor old Ed Miliband in the polls.

Sarkozy bolsters his own election hopes as he launches an ever‐popular tirade against les rosbifs and their appalling belief in free markets. It’s win‐win. That is the point about the pantomime xenophobia between the French and the British: it is essentially innocent — or more innocent than almost any other form of xenophobia; because in our hearts, au fond, neither side really believes it.

We have to admit there are times when we enjoy a good old orgy of gratuitous Frog‐bashing. There are times when we are all prepared to read how our continental cousins are a bunch of garlic breathing Strauss‐Kahns with a deeply suspect interest in structuralism and gloomy films. In this stereotypical world, their women fail to shave their armpits, they have a weird obsession with suppositories and a fanatical lust to eat our children’s ponies.

As for the French view of the British, I am afraid that there are times when they can be heard to say that we have terrible food, that we prefer hot water bottles to sexual intercourse and that most of the men in our ruling class (this was a tart observation by former prime minister Edith Cresson) were not the marrying kind. This is the kind of cheerful abuse that we have been directing at each other for generations, and ever since the battle of Waterloo it has not been meant very seriously.

Deep down, all reasonable English people know that the French have an extraordinary culture, that their understanding of cheese‐making is god‐given, that they have high‐speed trains of a kind we are still trying to imitate and that it is a shame that we (and our children) are so feeble in our mastery of their beautiful language. You can tell that the British secretly love and admire the French by the sheer numbers who go to France for their holidays, and who make their homes in the Dordogne.

As for the French, they know in their hearts that for all the 20th‐century misunderstandings between us — Verdun, Mers‐el‐Kebir, Suez, de Gaulle’s “non” — we remain indispensable allies; and all civilised French people understand that we also have our good points: humour, gardens, custard, pubs, democracy, the theatre and everything else that makes this country great. That is why so many hundreds of thousands of French people have moved to England in the past 20 years, and that is why London is now the sixth or seventh biggest French city on Earth. In fact, there are now so many talented French people living in the English capital that a special MP has just been appointed for outre‐manche.

Victor Hugo said something about how the French and the English needed each other, because they both did well from the competition — and he was right. And the final reason to be cool about the gall of Gaul is, of course, that we are not the real object of French wrath. It isn’t Britain whose dithering is causing the continuing and growing uncertainty over the euro. Downing Street is not responsible for the failure to reassure the markets with a credible plan to guarantee the sovereign debt of the peripheral euro nations.

The French are really disappointed with Germany; and it is a golden rule of European politics that when France is angry with Germany, Britain gets the blame. That is because a rant against Germany is a very different thing, with a much heavier charge. Sixty‐seven years after the war, the French are facing up to the reality that the European experiment has failed to contain German economic might, and that the Germans are unwilling and unable to help other countries cope with the agony of the euro.

That is what is really making them angry — but that is taboo.  Much better to chuck a cow at les Anglais.