1. We should tax things that we want less of.
2. Therefore, we need to tax land values and pollution.

(a) We fail to do this. We tax work and purchases, so we have less work, i.e. unemployment, and fewer sales/exchanges than we might have.

(b) As a result of under-taxing land values, we have high land prices, big mortgages and high levels of private debt.

(c) We also wonder why we can’t get on top of carbon pollution to manage climate change.

Therefore, we might ask ourselves who benefits from our misbegotten tax regimes.

These people, among a multitude of others, would agree.

The above transcript and transposition of the formula offers a robust and testable economic model which might assist to demonstrate the inverse relationship between wages/profits and the privatization of economic rents. There are implications for the financial catastrophes which flow from excessively privatized rent capitalized into impossibly high land prices.

That the formula is fundamentally the same as that of Henry George published in “Progress and Poverty” back in 1879, namely;-

Produce – Rent = Wages + Interest

should add further to the model’s credibility.

Let’s take a peep at the repetitively destructive socio-economic role of bursting land price bubbles.

Another slant: –

KPI.pptx (live.com)

So, yes, there is a proper response to misbegotten cyclic busts. They are not “the natural business cycle” as we’re often advised. They can be remedied by a genuine tax reform which includes an all-in land tax, along with the abolition of some 100 other taxes as a trade-off, along the lines recommended by the Henry Tax Review.

• h/t Warren Mosler 16 Feb 2024

So why is the media always so solicitous about so-called ‘national debt’? 2008 surely pulled the rug from under that nonsense?

“The tax system is worse than it was fifteen years ago“: Ken Henry.

It’s weird that major natural disasters appear to accompany financial collapses. They’re sometimes held to have caused the financial recession. They don’t. It’s us.

I had “Unlocking the Riches of Oz: A case study of the economic costs of real estate bubbles 1972 to 2006” published in early 2007 because I believed the 2008 Australian property collapse might stand “as a proxy for economies of the world”. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 proved to be the biggest collapse since the 1929 depression.

In the same year, the United Nations reported that cyclones, earthquakes and hurricanes around the world made 2008 one of the worst years of the decade. These included the deathly Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar.

In late 2018, I used the same barometer of the economy to forecast economic recession in 2020, of course without knowing that COVID-19 was about to hit the world.

As China wrestles with an initial decline in its land markets, I’m led to wonder what if any natural disaster is going to accompany the bursting of the world land price bubble some time in 2026/27.