I looked for some hope to emerge from the weekend G20 talks in Washington.  There was none. No ray of hope at all.

IMF Chairperson Christine Lagarde and World Bank President Robert Zoellick and others spoke in platitudinous terms, trying to say all the right things, but saying nothing that’s going to assist effective demand and recovery.

They believe they will be able to avoid sovereign debt default by demanding austerity measures and financial rectitude, but how will cutting government spending create demand and put people back to work?

All failed to see the elephant in the room.  It’s not about credit and money, but about on what exactly money has been misspent.

Speculators, bankers and fund managers all need to be given a firm new direction which precludes the private capture of the public’s economic rent via land price bubbles.

The public’s land and natural resource rents needs to be captured for public revenue and the excess distributed as a dividend – equally to all citizens.

Banks who failed us should be let fail.  Taxes on labour and capital need to be abolished.

No one said that.

It’s not looking good.

Worst of all, ‘the world greatest treasurer’, Wayne Swan, prevaricated when Barrie Cassidy questioned him this morning on The Insiders about the upcoming tax forum on 4 and 5 October.  There is now no doubt that the Australian treasurer, amongst other recommendations, wants to hose down former Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s ideas for restructuring state land taxes.

Swan is clearly falling into line with the very worst aspects of his G20 confreres.  Banks and political expediency, it seems, are more important than people and genuine tax reform.

Australian social documentarian Don Parham’s “The Third Way” has turned 21.

1990? Dated? In the year 2011, its message is more relevant than ever.

We’re at a watershed all right!

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The IMF says we’re in a dangerous new phase “with a recovery that is much weaker than was predicted”.

“Recovery”, guys?

Er, hate to tell you ….. there can be no recovery until we un-tax labour and capital, and then capture our economic rents for revenue. We’ve got to get things moving again.

This revenue switch is the sine qua non for financial recovery.  It’s non-negotiable, guys.  Without it, economies are going to experience a lingering death – like Japan’s after its colossal real estate bubble burst at the end of the 1980s.

Got it?  No recovery without capturing land and natural resource rents instead of taxes.

So, please don’t mention the word “recovery” again until it’s in the same sentence as land and other natural resource rent capture.  OK?

IT’S TIME

Henry Georgists aren’t fly-by-nighters. As the picture shows, we’ve been around a long time, patiently explaining how rent-seekers get a free ride off the annual value of the public’s natural resource rents, and how the parasitical behaviour of these people repetitively inflates speculative real estate bubbles that burst into financial chaos every eighteen years.

Over the years, I’ve seen countless attempts to rebut the Georgist claim that to set the economy to rights we need to abolish arbitrary taxation imposts and capture instead our economic rents for public finance – but none have come within a bull’s roar of refuting the idea, because they’ve all misrepresented the Georgist position in one way or another.

Even the Austrian School’s paragon, Murray Rothbard, chanced his arm with a remarkably brainless attempt that was dismissed surgically here, here and here.

Why then hasn’t Georgism been taken up?

An argument is put that, if it worked, it would have been adopted by now, but this is to ignore the enormous political clout wielded by free-loading rentiers. (Remember Gina Rinehart and her billionaire friends spending millions to protest against the public getting its fair share of mineral rents?  I note now people have taken the time to think it through, public opinion has  turned in favour of the mining tax.)

I’ve previously mentioned that a land tax was: (a) argued by Leo Tolstoy to his friend Russian Prime Minister Stolypin in 1907 as a way of avoiding riots and revolution; (b) set as the cornerstone of the 1909 People’s Budget in Britain (but assiduously avoided by the British aristocracy by employing underhand techniques, not the least of which was manufacturing WWI); and, (c) actually introduced in Australia federally by the Fisher government in 1910.

So, one hundred years ago ,the case for a tax on land values was clearly being well propounded.

A hundred years on, with the symptoms of an economic depression all about us and nascent interest in the benefits of land value capture in the air again, it may well be that Georgism is the solution whose time has come.

AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW 20 September 2011:-

OCTOBER TAX FORUM

The tax forum to be held in Canberra on 4 and 5 October is to consider recommendations made by former Treasury secretary Ken Henry in ‘Australia’s Future Tax System’.

There will be 156 participants and 46 observers, but members the federal opposition have been excluded, as were applicants associated with Prosper Australia.

The participants will be made up of 32 community representatives, 32 business representatives and tax practitioners, 13 union representatives, seven superannuation fund and financial planning representatives, 20 academics and other tax experts, 19 federal ministers and MPs, nine federal crossbench politicians, five heads of federal agencies, eight state and territory government ministers, three local government representatives, five members of the Australia’s Future Tax System Review Panel and three members of the GST Distribution Review Panel.

Observers will be made up of 10 members of the general public, 10 students, 18 federal department and agency representatives and eight state and territory department representatives.

Dr Gavin Putland’s analysis of the good, the bad and the ugly taxes might assist you, guys!

As Prosper Australia members have been precluded from attending, Karl Fitzgerald is having a Tax Summit special screening of the documentary “Real Estate 4 Ransom” at 6:30 pm on Tuesday 4 October at the Dendy Canberra Centre, level 2/148 Bunda Street.  Karl will take questions after the screening.

There will be much more relevance to the tax-induced plight of world economies found in the documentary than will be canvassed at the forum, so all participants on 4^th and 5^th of October and members of the Coalition parties should also take the opportunity to attend on the evening of the 4^th if they are at all interested in addressing real solutions to the global financial crisis.

Tickets are available here.

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I watched last night Jim Whitaker’s documentary film Rebirth on ABC1.  It chronicled the lives of four people who lost loved ones in the ‘9/11’ attack on  the Twin Towers, and one woman who survived, disfigured.

You quickly came to see it was not only the dead who were victims of the attack.  Those five represented the stories of many thousands of family and friends inextricably linked to the three thousand who lost their lives on that day.

We witness the five pass touchingly through the stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, over ten years, as they moved on bravely with their lives.

As the incredible stupidity of war continues to be waged around the world, it crossed my mind the US experienced its own concentrated black hole of war on that day. It carries unlearned lessons.

But can you protest at machinery,

because it has always seemed to me

it’s a failed economics,

not people,

cause war?

In the last few days my spouse and I ventured to Western Australia for a totally enjoyable family celebration. (I even took a break from my notebook!)

Perth is as modern and brash as ever, the young blokes switching lanes and tailgating in their Ford and Holden utes with a manic fervor still only rarely seen in Melbourne.  Perth – the West generally – is on the move, cranes still doing their thing on the skyline of the CBD, but property values are now on the decline.

Further south, I couldn’t believe the extent of prestigious new homes and apartments exhibiting their best aspect to Bunbury’s inner and outer harbours.  Many were obviously occupied, but could there possibly be buyers for all the rest of them?

South again, Busselton wasn’t as aggressively developmental, but there were also some particularly attractive homes in that attractive little city.

We stayed at Pier 21 on the Swan River at North Fremantle on the way back to Perth, overlooking the footpath and marina.

Not as enjoyable as the family gig, but certainly another feature of the trip was running into a local walking his dog near the Freo Water Police building as we walked along beside the Swan.

“Is there a place nearby where we can get a bite?” I inquired. “Yes, just take a fifteen minute stroll down Harvest Road, over the Stirling Highway, and you’ll see a hamburger place and a little bar, side-by-side.

We took this stroll past a series of smallish period homes and a couple of impressive mansions, finally introducing ourselves to what turned out to be the owner of the bar and the hamburger shop, a former Melburnian. I enjoyed a Beck’s beer, my wife a gin and tonic, in Mrs Brown’s bar as we waited for our hamburgers from Flipside.

Mrs Brown’s had a lovely local cachet, and, from all the pictorial evidence, I rather suspect Mrs Brown may have been Queen Victoria.

Into the bar from next door came the best tasting hamburgers I’ve had since the burgery on Nepean Highway at Brighton which used to be diagonally opposite Tommy Bent’s statue in Brighton in the 1960s!

It was worth another Beck’s, to enjoy the ambience of both nicely-run businesses.

As with anywhere else in Australia, building development and businesses activity in the West add to the nation’s character and wealth.  They don’t deserve to be damaged by such disastrous revenue and banking regimes.

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