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Did you know that the natural level of interest rates is zero?

Warren Mosler may disagree, but if we were capture all land rent, land prices would also be zero – and we’d then abolish all inflation in one fell swoop.

That would enable us to have a universal income which would replace all pension-type transfer payments!

Stephen Zarlenga collated Henry George’s thoughts on money here. George was a ‘conservative Greenbacker’ and supportive of MMT before it got its first ‘M’.

What a different, functioning economy we might have, working to reduce private debt – and abolish monopoly super-profits!

No parallels to 2021, of course?

The mid-to-late 1950s residential bubble was followed by Prime Minister Menzies’ 1961 “credit squeeze”.

60 years on, is this is a better analysis than we get today about the result of real estate booms? I think so. It invokes the 1880s bubble and the 1893 depression.

1. PDF version

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Re asterisk on inflation: See “Hercule Poirot“

Power ensures that the way things are is the way they were meant to be. After all these years, if things were meant to be otherwise surely that’s the way they would be?

Political parties acknowledge the power structure, accepting its donations for survival and promoting its aims. Under pressure, political change occasionally occurs at the margins.

People are subservient to a privileged elite living off them parasitically: they are indebted collateral damage to banking, monopolies and their advertising. This is natural.

Millennial thinking about a tax shift that abolishes income and sales taxes to sustain a universal income and paying instead the rent of land we occupy is just a silly dream.

We accept this. We live with it. It’s the way things were meant to be.

And oldie but a goodie, Bruce Petty!

Appropriate again?