A new word: “VIMMLBUTT” ?

It needs to catch on, like the virus: except it’s remedial in nature.

It’s made up of 3 separate acronyms representing what’s actually necessary right now if we’re to manufacture socio-economic repair over the next 10 years. Anything less won’t do it.

We need an overarching approach: petty pro tem detail [like JobKeeper and JobSeeker] aren’t enough.

MMT [Modern Monetary Theory]

UBI [A “living wage” Universal Basic Income]

LVT [Land Value Taxation]

Best I can do from the 9 letters of the 3 acronyms is the word VIMMLBUTT : pronounced “vimmelbutt”?

That’s it.

We need to insert VIMMLBUTT into our social discourse and fabric.

Otherwise, things are going to get pretty bad over the next ten years.

Colonialism and slavery is just what we did then, even if it was wrong. Who were we to argue with the powers that be? Times were different.

Pumping up land prices, is just what we do these days, even if it does keep wages and profits low and generates debt, poverty and impossible mortgages; that is, except for banking and other rent-seeking monopolies whose do quite well from rent-seeking. That’s just what we do.

“Who are we to argue with the 0.1%?”

“Look what “Occupy Wall Street” achieved. Nothing.”

“We can’t do anything.”

Really?

References:

1. https://thedepression.org.au/the-silence-of-the-historians/

2. https://thedepression.org.au/balance-of-power-as-a-damning-heritage/

3. https://thedepression.org.au/the-truth-about-high-land-prices/

4. https://thedepression.org.au/stop-laughing-this-is-serious/

True market price discovery was destroyed by central banks conniving to pump up asset markets in order to maintain the ‘con’ in ‘confidence’.

Into what sort of a world have we descended? Banking and finance has come to subsume free market capitalism, so the conspiracy to prop up real estate, bond and share markets can’t possibly end well.

People, their impossible levels of private debt, their declining wages and increasing levels of poverty and dispossession rank lowly in this misbegotten agenda.

Something big is afoot, and the title of this blogsite could provide a hint.

It was all underway, long before the coronavirus.

I sense a perturbance in the bourse.

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“…. history exhibits us, at different periods, in the act of casting our sword into the scale of every European state. In the meantime events have proclaimed, but in vain, how futile must be our attempts to usurp the sceptre of the Fates. Empires have arisen unbidden by us; others have departed despite our utmost efforts to preserve them. All have undergone change so complete that, were the writers who only a century ago lauded the then existing state of the balance of Europe to reappear, they would be startled to find, in the present relations of the continent, no vestige of that perfect adjustment which had been purchased at the price of so much blood. And yet we have able writers and statesmen of the present day, who would advocate a war to prevent a derangement of what we now choose to pronounce the just equipoise of the power of Europe.”

England, Ireland and America, Richard Cobden, 1835

Anyone we know?

Anyone we’re likely to know?

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All wealth is produced by labour, from land.

Everyone has an equal right to the use of land.

The value of land is generated by the community and its services.

What is produced by a person’s labour is his or hers, not the government’s nor anybody else’s.

Allowing land values to be privately expropriated amounts to a double-theft, i.e. it also involves the expropriation of individuals’ wages via the taxing of productivity.

Holding valuable land out of use deprives others of the opportunity to make a living.  

Therefore, we need to tax annual land values away, in order to curb inflation, afford revenue at local and local levels, and to abolish taxes on productive activity.

It follows logically that what we have now is unfair and generates inequality: a breach of the most fundamental of human rights.

Sir Ronald East had something to say about modern monetary theory in 1945.

Nice interview. Yes, George Gammon, governments don’t create wealth. But neither will they allow the asset markets to tank, as they should do. So, thank God governments are meanwhile investing in people and businesses, so they may help to create wealth – until the asset markets can no longer be kept inflated …… and then some!

There is a role for government, George.