Some people acquire wealth by taking chances which to the majority of people must necessarily bring loss. Such are many forms of speculation, and especially that mode of gambling known as stock dealing.
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I’d come to the conclusion that Rent is the glue that might bind a hopelessly lost and fractured world.
Fred Harrison’s new #WeAreRent goes even further. In a brilliant exposition, he describes how Rent was the mechanism that elicited us to grow from apes into humanity’s Social Galaxy.
But we’ve arrived at a critical moment in history: Postclassical economists have given Free Riders permission to reverse the process.
History, if we are to have one, will regard #WeAreRent as the book of our times. It is an essential read.
Once you allow banking to offer debt against the ephemera of the escalating land prices it inflates–land having no cost of production– maybe it’s understandable that banks start taking other liberties?
They feel ‘entitled’?
There’s some solid logic behind Michael Scott’s Theory of Social Class!
I’m a Loser.
[Yeah, OK – I know!]
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The USA calls it “antitrust”, whereas Australians prefer the term “regulation”. It’s about authorities we give the power to make decisions and arrangements to end business corruption, collusion, cartels, monopoly, excessive power, &c.
I know, stop laughing! It never works and it never will.
When they run out of ideas, regulators usually seek to break monopolies up into smaller pieces. But I have a question: Why is it commercial practice at the small business level that when a ‘going concern’ is leased, the net profit is split equally (before income tax, depreciation and amortisation, and after any adjustment for non-recurrent expenditures) as landlord’s rental and tenant’s profit, but this isn’t done for giant monopolies when the nation is the landlord of the used resource?
The Rudd government tried to do something along these lines with the Resource Super Profits Tax on mining companies, but it went awry when the companies, most of them American, spent up big in an advertising campaign to scare the wits out of Australians. And it worked.
If tenants of small businesses were to jack up on paying any rent because they also pay tax, what do you think the landlord would do about the lease? …….. Yup! 👌
Where exactly is the point where you get big enough that you don’t have to comply with normal commercial practice when, like Google or Facebook, you are able to threaten governments that you will remove your ‘service’ if you’re required to do what other businesses have to do?
‘Regulation’ isn’t an answer; it’s part of the problem. If mega-companies are mining the nation’s mineral wealth, or Big Tech is using the electromagnetic spectrum, they owe 50% net profit to their landlord, the national government. Governments have proven delinquent in acting in the national interest, using ‘regulators’ as an excuse to institute nonsense, whilst ignoring common sense solutions to gargantuan monopolies.
Let’s accept that government does have a role in spending productively, and that taxes don’t fund government.
Let’s understand that taxes add enormously to prices.
Let see that land prices are pathological, land having no cost of production.
It follows, therefore, that taxing land prices away instead of taxing labour and capital will abolish both consumer price inflation and the inflation of ‘asset prices’.
MMT requires the public capture of ground rent/’LVT’ as it cannot be passed on in prices.
This combination abolishes rent-grabbing parasitism: it allows the national surplus product/net income to be distributed equally to all as a citizens’ dividend.
Ground rent and citizens’ dividend are different sides of the same coin.
This trinity is rarely acknowledged, but we do need VIMMLBUTT for the ‘post-industrial’ financialisation of the economy to be repaired.
